Due Process
by T.S. Blue
Summary: Bo's in trouble, Luke's trying to fix it with his usual flair, Jesse wants to solve it the legal way, Daisy's working to keep the peace, and Rosco's just muddling through it all. Rated T for language and general roughness. Complete.
1. Serious This Time

_**Author's Note:** Action/Adventure with a side of angst. In other words, not so dark and back to my roots._

_Relevant canon is as follows: this takes place after_ Brotherly Love_ and_ The Boar's Nest Bears_. It precedes_ Twin Trouble_, because it borrows the "new lawyer in town" from there (and in fact, since the Dukes meet him here, this story might just preempt the episode)._

_This first chapter is longer than long, but that's not going to be a trend going forward. The structure kind of called for this. Plus, I'll keep future author's notes to a minimum._

_Which means I'll state here once and for all that I do not own Dukes characters or settings. Original characters... those are mine and not a ton of fun to be around. Try not to run into them in dark alleys._

_Also, I'll thank readers in advance for any and all feedback._

_Cheers!_

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Chapter One -- Serious This Time

_**I. You Have the Right to Remain Silent.**_

The cell with the window, what he and Luke had dubbed the honeymoon suite. Not that it had mattered which of the basement enclosures they wound up in. The two smelled equally rank, chilled down the same way in the darkness and grew just as sweaty during the day. Both too small for two grown men, and yet Rosco had almost always seen fit cage them together. Dark spaces, echoing thunderously with every tiny movement, and nothing to deter shade-dwelling insects and rodents from walking right in and taking up residence in that same nine-by-nine square of concrete. And it was every bit as familiar as their bedroom at the farmhouse.

Except today, when there was no one breathing the same moldy air, stinking of sweat and frustration, no wide hand making a mess of dark curls, as if the fingers raking through there could scratch a brilliant plan to life.

In all his life, there hadn't ever been a place Luke couldn't follow him into, if he wanted. Didn't work both ways, though. Bo's life had been one big game of catch up, always too small or too young, starting from when Luke first went off to school. Funny now to remember how eager he was to join his cousins there and how betrayed he felt when he realized that it was primarily a place where he was tortured through long and meaningless hours of sitting still, learning things that would have little bearing on his adult life.

Most places he chased after Luke to were better than that, though. Used to be he wasn't allowed to go fishing, not until he proved he wouldn't talk too loud and scare away all the fish, or go splashing off into the pond and drown himself. Took him awhile to follow Luke off in pursuit of girls, but when he realized what that was all about, he stopped resenting all the pretty fillies that turned his cousin's head, and started noticing their finer features himself. Pursued his cousin into the soulful art of driving as soon as he could convince their uncle to let him give it a try, then wound up learning mechanics out of necessity. The only real _Do Not Enter _sign that ever stood between him and Luke was the Marine Corps. Too young to join, and by the time that stopped being the case Luke was back from the service and making him swear he'd never take a tour of duty. War, he said, was nothing Bo needed to get involved in, and peacetime couldn't be counted on to last for any length of time. The Reserves were a compromise, one Luke hadn't wanted to make but Jesse had tipped the dispute in Bo's favor. Military service could be good for a man, he said.

Finally, though, Luke had wound up going a place his kid cousin would never even get close to, turned out to have something that Bo had no stake in. More than a dull little domestic morning of watching Luke stumble through the process of baking pies got interrupted by that knock on the door a few weeks ago; it was at that moment that everything Bo had ever been came to an end.

It wasn't that he didn't like Jud. (He didn't like Jud.) Or that he wouldn't, in time. When the guy learned how to be a better Duke, maybe, how not to dump his problems on his family's front porch, then try to sneak out the back door. When Jud figured out how not to let Luke get hurt (close to killed, actually) on his behalf, then whine about how it was all his fault instead of doing anything to help, maybe then Bo would figure out liking him.

Or maybe it couldn't happen until Luke's little brother stopped being the center of everyone's attention, and that might just never come to pass.

Luke's real brother – Bo couldn't compete with that. He hadn't been in the habit of thinking of himself as just a cousin, but once he realized the truth, there was no going back. He was Luke's cousin, and probably his best friend, but until Jud showed up, it had never really occurred to him that he and Luke would do anything but live their lives out side-by-side. Even those days he'd spent with Diane Benson, he'd known to be an anomaly. It was only a matter of time, he figured three years ago, before Luke would see things his way. His stubborn cousin would work himself around to understanding, then join Bo and Diane on the Carnival's rounds, finding new fans in each city they stopped at. It would only be a year after that, he reckoned, before him and Luke made a big enough name on the Carnival of Thrills tour to find themselves on the NASCAR Circuit.

It might not have gone down quite that way, but it was close enough. Sure he broke up with Diane and him and Luke made their way to the NASCAR Circuit through the traditional means of dirt-track racing. Together they left and together they stayed until they came back together, by mutual decision. It was just another adventure in his life that led him to the false conclusion that he and Luke would follow the same path. Naïve thought.

Family, Luke was his family and in all his life he'd never really needed more than his tight-knit clan. Somehow he'd reckoned they never needed more than him either. They'd stay together – the three Duke kids under their Uncle Jesse's protection – forever. He should have known better. Then again, most of what he knew about adulthood came from the stories of Hazzard's old-timers. No one from Bo's own generation had ever officially grown up or anything, and the habit seemed to have gone the way of horse-drawn carriages and one-room schoolhouses. Settling down had stopped happening sometime after the last generation of Dukes had been just about wiped out; seemed like an unhealthy practice. Growing up in Hazzard put Dukes at risk of leaving their children behind as orphans.

But when Jud showed up and gave Luke family of a different nature – a closer relation than any of them had had since Jesse lost his brothers and taken in three bereft children – well, it changed the way a man thought about some things.

Dating Miranda Taylor marked the first time he'd ever considered anything to be bigger than the moment it took place within. She wasn't Diane, didn't flatter him and offer glamour or fame. She was just a girl (pretty enough, with her shining dark hair and striking gray-green eyes) with a small-town childhood of her own, and a family history that rivaled the Dukes'. Sure, she'd been raised by her own parents in the small town of Ashville, Florida (_only place hotter'n Hazzard_, she'd said one Indian-summer day) along with her too many brothers. But their livelihoods had been about as hand-to-mouth as an Appalachian family's, and while there hadn't been any moonshining, Miranda assured him that she was no stranger to men on probation. She was a sweet thing, in need of a knight in shining armor. Ready to be loved, looking for a fresh start and a new home.

If he had to grow up, if he had to accept that Luke had a real brother, if that meant he needed a family beyond his cousins and uncle, there were much worse people he could do all that with than Miranda Taylor.

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II. Should you choose to give up this right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

It was serious this time. He had himself one Duke boy in the slammer. Cuffed and stuffed the boy himself, not a half hour ago yet. And this time, this time—

Boss was happy, anyway. Crowing away in his office, sucking down sweets while singing tuneless songs of glee. It was easy to giggle with the man, better than those days when he got yelled at and told to take his fool carcass somewhere, anywhere Boss wasn't.

This time, as far as Rosco knew, his brother-in-law wasn't behind it. Or, not entirely behind it, anyway. That Benjamin Taylor fellow, he'd been around before, behind closed doors and choking on cigar smoke while Boss told him – something. Kicked Rosco right out and he'd learned not to take that kind of thing too personally. It was for his own protection, really. The less he knew, the less he'd have to play sheriff, snooping into places where he'd long ago learned he had no business. Lulu gave Boss three square meals (and countless oblong snacks) a day, and in return, Rosco got protected from the dangers of Hazzard. In the safe job of Sheriff.

Oh, it used to rankle him, make him snappish like Flash when someone rubbed her wiry fur backwards, standing on end in a prickly mess. His childhood afternoons of scrapping with other boys on the playground had always stopped cold when Lulu's formidable shadow towered over them. Dirty kids, trying for all the world to engage in the meritorious activity of shoving each other's faces into the grass, and all it took was "Rosco's sister's here!" and they'd all suddenly remember that their mamas wanted them.

Made sense when he was a scrawny seven-year-old; most of the kids were bigger than him and fairness wasn't more important than winning, not on the Hazzard School playground. Used to be fine that nobody wanted to mess with Lulu Coltrane, who had weight, a screeching voice, and maternal instinct on her side. But somewhere around the age of ten, when boys and girls alike started calling him crybaby-Coltrane (which wasn't fair, because he didn't cry and it wasn't like he even asked for Lulu's help) and going out of their way to, all accidental-like, send him flying into the walls of the gymnasium when they were supposed to be shooting baskets, it started to put a crimp his style. It took until after Lulu graduated (and thankfully she was five years older than him, so that left him with a lot of years to prove himself before he got done with school) for Rosco to come into his own.

After that, he was a man. A deputy by the age of eighteen, and he had himself a gun and no need of a big sister's protective arms. Not that it stopped Lulu one bit, but he didn't need her. He could take care of himself.

And man he'd stayed, earning his stripes to the point of becoming sheriff, making people at least hate him if not exactly respect him. It had been fine, really, when he'd had deputy minions to menace and a comfortable retirement to look forward to someday. Reckoned he'd find himself a cabin up there on the rim of Lake Chickamahoney and teach himself to fish. By that time Lulu had married the only tormentor Rosco had left, Boss Hogg. Changed their relationship, made the commissioner go from mean to vicious. Made him cantankerous, cruel, and eventually made him Rosco's only friend.

And instead of Lulu fending off bullies, it was him and his sister fighting over Boss Hogg. A marked improvement. In the end, a tacit truce got called. Lulu got her "sweet dumpling" nights, and Rosco got his "little fat buddy" days. Turned him into an insomniac for a while there, but ever since he'd gotten Flash, sleep was easy. Nothing better than dog snores (and the occasional lapping tongue) to put a man to sleep.

Sleep, Boss wanted him to do it half the day, too. Like whenever some new stranger showed up in the courthouse, all but looking down his nose at the law of Hazzard, and demanding to see the commissioner. Most times doors got closed with Rosco on the wrong side, stuck in the company of his damn-fool honest dipstick of a deputy. That part was probably all for the best, though. If he knew for sure what went on in that office, well he might have to do things that would ruin lives. Lulu's, Boss's, but mainly his own. Because ever since his pension got defeated in the general election of 1978, his retirement on some far off and glorious day relied on him staying out of those things his brother-in-law did behind closed doors.

Whatever scheming sorts of meetings might have taken place between Benjamin (not Ben or Benny, though the man was no better than any farmer in Hazzard, he was pretentious enough to insist on being nothing less than Benjamin) Taylor and the Boss, they hadn't been a part of what happened today, at least as far as Rosco could tell. Sure didn't seem like it this morning, when Benjamin showed up red-eyed and yammering too fast about how his baby sister was missing, last seen going out for a horseback ride with Bo Duke. Borrowed horses, Old Man Miller's to be precise, and it turned out that they were just as gone as the girl. That part, at least, made sense. There'd been a rash of horse rustling in Hazzard, the kind of crime that kept the natives up in arms. In a county where no one had ever learned to lock their doors, even after all the strange crime sprees over the years – including that one where all the shiny, new tractors in town got yanked right out of their barns, but tractors weren't horses, didn't nicker when a man approached, didn't have personalities. Until Flash, Rosco had only half understood farmers' attachments to livestock. Now that he'd learned the real meaning of companionship, well, if it meant stepping in dog mess every now and again, it was worth it. Yep, horse rustling was a much more serious crime than tractor theft (and it wasn't just because Boss had been behind the tractor scam that made him think that way).

Thoughts of Flash made the sheriff come closer to sympathy than scorn when Taylor reported his sister missing, then Old Man Miller (who had a first name, and once upon a time, back when boys wore their hair cut above their ears and none of that wild fluff hanging in their eyes, Rosco had known it) showed up in that same five minute span, complaining of the loss of two of his gentlest geldings, sweet-tempered animals that he'd lent to Bo Duke yesterday. Not that Miller reckoned the Duke boy had any hand in their disappearance; he'd lent those Duke kids his horses more times than he could count, and they'd always been quietly returned to the stables, watered, fed and brushed by the time Miller went out to check on them.

The morning's activity left the sheriff with two mysteries to solve, and the horse farm was the obvious place to begin his investigation. So he did, even when that Taylor boy kept whining in his ear at the pitch of a distant chainsaw about how Bo and Miranda were known to ride through Harper's Woods. The sheriff ignored complaints about a missing person being more important than missing horses; the boy had no understanding of how Hazzard law worked. Besides, Old Man Miller was a resident whose tax money supported some part of Rosco's salary, and Taylor was just a lay-about transient like all boys his age. And then there was the fact that police work was Rosco's life, he knew what was best for his county and—

"Enos," he finally gave in, and called for the deputy's backup. "Meet me at the Miller Farm."

"10-4," was music to his ears, meant he'd be able to unload that Benjamin Taylor boy soon and get to the heart of his investigation. It looked to be a tough one, what with horse hoof prints leading away in every direction from the Miller stables. A man could follow each one for miles before finding anything.

Seemed forever before that dipstick of a deputy he'd been saddled with, back from Los Angeles but no faster than the same molasses he'd ever been, to get to the scene. Rosco all but shoved one of his prized field radios in Enos' hands and gave him explicit instructions to take the Taylor boy with him to Harper's Woods, and not to call in unless he had something worth investigating. It was a wild goose chase he was sending the boy off on, but then if there was anyone that was fit to hunt after birds that weren't even smart enough to fly south in winter, it was Enos Strate.

Which was what made it so surprising that, less than fifteen minutes of progress tracking hoof prints later, the deputy was hollering over the field radio. Proper radio protocol forgotten, the foolish boy was babbling something about a bloody jacket belonging to Bo Duke.

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III. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning.

It might have been all the fences they'd built and then rebuilt over the years since they got big enough to hoist the lumber by themselves. Uncle Jesse wasn't young, never in his kids' memory anyway, but he'd been stronger once. Now, even on his laziest day, Bo wouldn't want their uncle to try digging post holes for fear of the ache it would set into his shoulders. Besides, fence building was penance for playing rough; fishtailing around town was all well and good until someone's fence got knocked over. Didn't matter whether it was the Dukes or the law that did the knocking, it was up to him and Bo to fix what Rosco could never have, even when the sheriff had the strength of youth behind him.

They'd gotten good at their second trade, him and Bo had, leaving behind stronger and straighter fences than what they'd destroyed. Neat and carefully arranged, that was the thing he'd learned from fences, they served their purpose best when they ran in straight lines.

Or maybe it was the military that had influenced his thoughts about the stability of things that were in tight formation. Drill instructors yammering in recruits' ears about their posture, how tightly their strong bodies fit together. "Backside to bellybutton," was the insistent instruction wherever they went, perfectly straight lines important for reasons that were never exactly revealed.

Could have been sitting shotgun with Bo Duke all these years, just about losing his lunch on some of those dangerous curves of the Hazzard roadways. Whatever it was, Luke had developed a fondness for simple things and straight lines.

Except those bars that stood between him and Bo now. Aligned and unforgiving, and hovering there on the other side of them, Bo was scared. Not that he was admitting to any such thing.

"I'm okay," had been his first words, and he repeated them now. "I'm okay, Luke." Because the first time he'd said it for everyone's benefit; for Uncle Jesse, who reached through the bars to pat Bo on the shoulder, then Daisy, who kissed his flushed cheek.

They were smart people, his uncle and cousin, knew enough to console Bo then step back, letting Luke get to the bottom of the matter. A man couldn't fix a thing unless he knew exactly in all the ways it was broken, so Luke had stepped right up to the cell, hands gripping bars until his fingers hurt from clenching down so hard. Bo had his own handholds on two consecutive bars, right in front of his chest. That tight little stance there, the way the corner of his cousin's pink lip was trapped between his teeth, those things belied the words Bo kept repeating about how he was all right. No broken bones, no blood, to that Luke would agree. But Bo was far from okay.

"What happened?" Luke asked, voice low and calm. Had to soothe that lip out from between Bo's teeth if he was ever going to get to the bottom of this.

"I don't know," was all the answer he got. Wasn't helpful, any more than the way Bo was shaking his head. "They said—Enos told me Miranda's been reported missing."

Miranda. Luke might have figured she'd be at the bottom of whatever mess Bo had gotten himself into. That girl was… well, she was exactly Bo's type, when he thought about it. Skinny, little thing that was just the right height to fit into the crook of his long arm and rest her head against his big, strong shoulder. Looking up at him with those light-colored eyes from between those long, dark lashes, she could twist Bo right around her fingers and turn him into a knotted up fool.

But Luke knew better, could see past those stories of an idyllic, sunshine childhood on a horse farm in the sticks of Florida. No one who'd had so many good things as a kid would choose to make their home in poor, backwater Hazzard as an adult. The girl wanted something, wanted more than she was admitting to. Wasn't money, if it had been, she would have been gone after that time Bo brought her home to meet Jesse. Sow belly and black-eyed pea dinner, eaten off a chipped plate while sitting on a splintering chair. She had to have recognized there was nothing to marry into, and she should have been gone.

But she stayed; she went for a ride in the General with them. Begged Bo to stop the car after a couple of routine ninety-degree slides. Crawled out of her window and over to the grassy edge of the road before her stomach gave out. Bo drove her home granny-style, with Luke shaking his head all the way. She wasn't Diane Benson, she wasn't after Bo's driving skills. But she was hungry for something, and it wasn't just Bo's love. Of that Luke was sure.

Deep breath. Luke let his head drop down as he sucked in the air, caught sight of how white his fingers were, gripping the bars. Needed to let go of them, needed to get the blood flow back into his hands. Needed to—

"Enos told me they found my old jacket, the one I been letting her wear," that ratty brown thing Bo hadn't put on in years, looked just a ridiculous on Miranda as it ever had on his cousin. "He said it was…" Bo's voice was catching in his throat, made Luke wish for the kind of strength that could bend metal, melting away the obstructions between himself and his cousin.

"Luke." That was a quiet warning from behind him. Uncle Jesse, wise old man. He stayed back but his tone reminded Luke that they already knew this part, had heard it directly from a gloating Boss Hogg. The jacket was covered in blood, the girl was missing and last seen with Bo. The evidence was circumstantial, but enough to hold that no-good Duke boy until his sheriff could get to the bottom of things. Things like horse rustling, which had been a common problem in the county this week, and conveniently, Old Man Miller's horses were just as missing as Miranda Taylor. And had also last been seen with Bo Duke. Open and shut case, the commissioner was sure, once Rosco finished collecting the evidence.

"All right," Luke answered, reckoned it would take care of Bo and Jesse all at once. Concentrated on his right index finger, forcing it to loosen from its grip around the bar. It came away sore; used to being bent now, it didn't want to straighten out. Luke ignored its complaints and moved on to his middle finger. Once it got loose, the rest followed along like obedient little brothers. One hand free of the bars, and he let his body sway inward, closer to Bo's. Found his aching right hand squeezing Bo's shoulder. "All right, we know that part. What happened before that? When you last saw her?"

Bo's head was shaking, he was about to come out with denials to accusations Luke hadn't made. His face red with what wanted to be anger, but his eyes gave him away. Bo was scared, terrified of Luke not believing him. Like it was even a remote possibility.

"All right, you Dukes." Now that right there was not a smart man. That was a man that was—"You've got to get out of here, now. This prisoner's restricted to a half hour visitation—ijit!"

That last word stood out as the most intelligent in the bunch, seeing as it was followed by the sheriff cowering back down out of his swagger. Probably in response to the way Luke was glowering at him; seemed like he'd been told that he could scare a grizzly bear under these kinds of circumstances.

"Half hour visitation? What kind of—"

"Now, Luke, ijit," Rosco stammered. "It ain't, they ain't my rules. He's been accused of a felony. Gij!" The man was just about backing into the stairwell he'd just emerged from, up to the safety of his squad room. Must have been the two steps Luke had taken toward him.

Jesse slid into Luke's line of vision, smooth as butter on hot toast. "The boy has a right to counsel, don't he?" It was growled, but the words were a lot more civilized that what Luke might have come out with.

"Now Jesse," Rosco responded, like the old friends and long-term enemies they'd always been. "You know well as I do that you ain't no lawyer."

"What I am or ain't don't matter one whit and you know it, Rosco." Jesse was going to threaten to tan the sheriff's hide in a second, all bluster and no follow-through, but no one outside of the Duke family knew that. "I ain't got to have no degree to counsel that boy."

"No, uh—" Rosco stammered, that pea he substituted for a brain probably going through the two or three things he actually did know about the law. "No you ain't. But them—" the stuttering fool had the good sense to wince as he looked at Luke and Daisy. "They got to go."

"Luke," came from behind him, Bo calling him back. The voice was as neutral as his cousin ever got, wasn't asking him for anything more than to stay calm. Not to make waves, because in the end, Bo was going to wind up spending a lot more time with Rosco than he was his family, and he didn't need the sheriff going into this thing – whatever it was going to turn out to be – with a grudge.

So Luke stepped back up to the bars and faced his cousin. Held his eyes long enough that there was nothing in the world but the two of them, then said, just as quietly if they were in the dark of their bedroom talking about things no one else should hear, "I'm going to get you out."

Bo gave him a brave nod, one that had complete confidence in Luke's ability to save him, before they reached through the bars and gave each other a pitiful excuse for a hug. Quick thing, because Luke had things to do, had to be on his way—

"Luke," that was Uncle Jesse, grabbing him by the arm, unwanted touch as he was about to push past Rosco and up the stairs. "You wait for me at the garage, boy." _And don't go pulling some fool stunt_, the old man's fading blue eyes said, in the way they flicked from one side of his face to the other. _Mind me_.

Luke sighed. A temporary setback, that was all. He could tolerate the half hour that Rosco was likely to hold Jesse to in counseling Bo. Seeing as he had no leads yet anyway. "Yes, sir."

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IV. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

Bo was standing up to his full height, showing Jesse just exactly how he wasn't beaten, that he had every expectation that things would turn out just fine soon enough. That was his youngest, trusting the world to treat him fairly, and if that didn't happen, his family would be there to make things right in the end. No reason to worry, not with Luke storming off to right whatever wrong was done to the boy. And right after Luke's dramatic exit, Daisy had marched as close to her baby cousin's face as she could get, and tearfully made all the same promises about how they'd fix everything, Bo wouldn't spend a single night in jail, not if she could help it.

Problem was, couldn't either of Bo's cousins even properly wrap their heads the charges yet: kidnapping (with Enos out there right now searching for a body to turn it into a murder charge) and horse rustling. Exactly the kind of idea that didn't bear thinking about, the things that would happen if the boy got convicted. It was certainly much easier to get mad, to imagine breaking Bo out of jail, followed by charging off in the General Lee to solve the crime themselves. And it was fine for Luke to plot that way most times, but not with a felony charge weighing against Bo. Escaped felons meant state troopers invading Hazzard with guns drawn, and Bo as their intended mark. Not exactly the game of cat and mouse they normally played with the Hazzard Sheriff's Department.

"Jesse," Bo begged him, the first words out of his mouth. "You've got to calm Luke down." Just about broke his heart, the way his youngest was worrying so hard after his cousin's state of mind. There had been a good hour between Bo's arrest and Cooter getting the word out to the rest of the Dukes. Showed up on their south forty, wheezing out words about how he'd tried to reach them on the C.B., but they'd never answered his calls. (Daisy had joked once about how the only place they didn't have a transmitter was on the tractor; didn't seem like such a ridiculous thought anymore.) Without taking time to breathe, Luke was all over the mechanic, just as close as the grease on his coveralls, demanding to know what was wrong with Bo. Boy was pretty alert when it came to his cousin and danger, but it hadn't taken Luke's sixth sense to make all three of the Dukes, working out there in the midday sun, figure out that something had happened to the youngest of the clan. He'd been sent to town in Jesse's pickup to collect the newly sharpened tractor blade out of the Hazzard Garage; if Cooter saw fit to drive his tow truck right out into the Dukes' half harvested field, it could only be because something was wrong with Bo.

It took the family another five minutes to get the story out of their friend, about how Rosco had screeched up to a halt, his sliding cruiser missing the pickup by no more than a hair, even as Cooter and Bo were loading the tractor blades into the bed. How the sheriff must have regained some of his youthful vigor, what with the way he'd slapped the cuffs on Bo fast enough that the boy didn't have time for one of those famous Duke boy escapes. How Rosco insisted he was serious this time, that he had Bo cuffed and now he was going to stuff him under the jail. How Cooter hadn't followed them to the courthouse, didn't know the details of the accusation. Instead, he'd tried everything to contact the Dukes before he'd given up and driven out to the farm.

After the information exchange, it was a fifteen minute drive to town, and another endless stretch of what must have been minutes for all that they felt like hours, arguing with J.D. Hogg to get access to Bo. Through that whole time, every bit of Luke's focus was on getting to his cousin, and it seemed like Bo had spent the same duration just thinking things through.

"Don't let him get himself hurt, Uncle Jesse. Whoever hurt Miranda—"

"Now Bo, we don't know that she's hurt," Jesse advised, because if there was one thing he'd learned in the years since he was a strapping young man the likes of his nephews, it was that things were often not what they seemed.

The boy waved him off. "She might be. Don't matter." Oh, but it did. She was the first girl Bo had ever brought home for a formal dinner. The first girl he'd stuck with, despite the tension she put between him and Luke. "Just make sure Luke don't go sticking his foot in the hornet's nest. Nor Daisy neither," he added, but they both knew that the girl's fit of temper would take a different form. She'd cry and rage and probably insist on accompanying Luke wherever he went, but she wouldn't go starting any trouble on her own.

"I'll take care of them, son," he agreed, because it was a good bet that he and his nephew didn't have a lot more time alone before Rosco came back to kick Jesse out, too. "You don't worry about it. You just tell me what you know about Miranda."

The sigh his youngest let out was painful to hear, frustration and anger doing their best to crowd out any sense of worry. "I don't know, Uncle Jesse," he snapped. If they'd been at the dinner table, the boy would have gotten reprimanded, and he knew it. His eyes dipped down in shame at bad behavior that was perfectly acceptable under the circumstances. "Me and Miranda went for a ride on Rainbow and Henry yesterday," two of Orren Miller's gentlest geldings. Horses Bo would select for a romantic ride, not his usual preference for speed. "We brought them back, I took her home," to her brother Benjamin who was renting what used to be old Hobie's cabin. The poor town drunk had fallen behind on his payments and gotten himself kicked out by Boss Hogg. Might have been the best thing for him in the end; his daughter Sally Jane over in Chickasaw had taken him in. Far as Jesse knew he was staying sober for his grandkids over there. "We was supposed to meet up tomorrow," Bo continued, pulling his uncle back to the problems in front of them. "To go out to the pond. Maybe have a picnic." Oh, Jesse knew better than that, knew what his boys did with girls out at the pond. But there was no point in quibbling now. "That's it."

Nothing to it except—"When did you give her your jacket?"

Bo shrugged his shoulders, but for all that careless posture, his eyes were moist. "Few days ago?" he guessed. "We was out by the pond after dark. She got cold, so I dug it out of the General's trunk. Told her to keep it."

"Was she wearing it yesterday?"

Another shrug, this one more violent than the last. "I don't remember. I mean, I think she must have been, in the morning. But by the time we brought the horses back… when I took her home, I know she didn't have it on no more. I just—" the boy was getting really frustrated with himself now. "I don't remember if she was carrying it or not."

"All right," Jesse agreed. It seemed like a good idea, Bo would do better to be reassured than prodded for more answers right now. "Come here," he added, because he knew they'd be pried apart soon. He waited for Bo to get close enough, then reached an arm into the cell to hug him. His youngest child clung to him miserably for the minute or two before they heard Rosco stomping down the stairs. "Don't you worry, boy," Jesse whispered. "We'll figure this out."


	2. Right, For All the Wrong Reasons

**Chapter Two – Right, For All the Wrong Reasons**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 1: All government, of right, originates with the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole. Public officers are the trustees and servants of the people, and at all times, amenable to them.**_

It was like being the bottom of Bronson's Canyon – the jail cell got dusky before the light left the world outside. Darker than he remembered it ever being, but then the last time he'd spent the night in here had been before he and Luke went off to NASCAR. As the shadows settled around him, Bo found himself counting back in his mind the number of days he'd spent in the Hazzard County jail, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember a single night he'd been in here without Luke. Hours, here and there, waiting for his cousin to bail him out in one way or another, but never an overnight.

He should be relieved, maybe, at not having to fight over the cot, and getting the scratchy blanket all to himself (because as much as Luke claimed to never get cold, somehow he always wound up with the lion's share of the blanket by dawn). No snoring tonight, either. And then there was the argument he was managing to avoid. The one where Luke spouted _I-told-you-sos_ about Miranda, how he knew all along that girl would wind up getting Bo in trouble.

It's the same fight they had the day after that basketball game they coached for the Boar's Nest Bears. The impromptu post-game party thrown in the middle of Hazzard Square was where Bo first ran into Miranda, in a literal kind of a way. Playing rough with Rod Moffett, a fake boxing match, and he'd ducked away from the kid's long armed swing to step on some nearly-bare toes. Tiny, strapped sandals were all that protected the girl's feet from the likes of tall men with big feet.

"Sorry, darlin'," he'd drawled; girls liked it when he called them that. Followed it up with a smile, because she was pretty and not only that, she was no one he'd ever met, much less been out on a date with before. And he could have sworn he'd catalogued every good-looking female within three counties. "You ain't from here," he blurted before he could think better of it.

To her credit, the girl never even glanced at her toes, didn't rub them in dismay. She just looked up through those nearly black bangs, staring at him with eyes as light as Luke's but closer to gray than blue. Startling things, and pretty in their own way.

"No," she'd agreed. "I'm not." Quiet tone to her voice, but the smile she gave back to him spoke volumes about his chances with her. (That and the fact that she didn't giggle and shove him away for using such a bland pick-up line.)

"Roddy," and it took a real feat of concentration to remember what he had been doing here in the first place. "Why don't you go off and play with the guys?"

The kid might or might not have nodded his head, Bo had no idea, since he didn't bother looking in that direction. But he heard the thudding footsteps as Rod trotted away.

"Bo Duke," he'd said, sticking out his hand.

She'd nodded seriously, as if she'd expected no other name to come from his lips. "Miranda Taylor," she'd introduced back.

The afternoon had passed quickly, sharing stories over ice cream cones, walking the perimeter of the square with Bo pointing out all the useful facts about a town that Miranda had lived in for all of a month now. Luke had left him to it, adhering to the tacit agreement to let each other be when one of them found a new conquest.

It wasn't until he'd been seeing her exclusively for a week that Luke's suspicious nature started to reveal itself. Questions about her family had surfaced, but they were easy enough to answer. Her oldest brother, Benjamin, was here in Hazzard with her, and he was just a regular guy. Didn't much care for cars, which might have been his primary flaw, but he and Miranda, plus their other three brothers, had been raised on a horse farm. Not exactly happily, their home life wasn't peaceful, but the two of them had come to Hazzard for a fresh start. Their brother Wilburn, who Miranda claimed was the best looking of the boys (but there was nothing wrong with Benjamin, who while he didn't share his sister's striking eyes, was certainly big and well enough built) would be joining them here soon. In time, she hoped that both boys would get work at the mill, and she'd picked up some steno skills that could be used in the office. If they could all earn a little money, they'd make Hazzard their permanent home. She never exactly explained what made them all want out of Florida, but then he'd never pushed. Seemed like painful territory, and she'd been kind enough not to probe into the details of what had happened to _his_ parents.

But Luke, he didn't care how much something hurt, he'd ask anyway.

"What would make her come to Hazzard, Bo? Why here?"

"Why not Hazzard?" Even without the probation that locked them in this county, he had a pretty good feeling he and Luke would have spent their whole lives here.

Later it was, "How come she left her family behind like that?"

A shrug and, "You went off to join the Marines," only led to a heated discussion of the difference between a tour of duty and running away from home.

"She's trouble, Bo," was a continuing theme, and one that he finally called Luke on.

"What kind of trouble? She ain't on probation, she ain't never even spent a night in jail. And she ain't running from no big-time gambler that wants to kill her and her family just for not taking a dive in a fight." That hadn't been his best move right there. He was a natural at poker, but not when he went revealing his hand like that, showing unsportsmanlike conduct and taking a cheap shot at Luke's brother. Luke's _real_ brother, which Bo wasn't.

And that little admission brought the debate (not fight, somehow they were both tiptoeing around the still-jagged edges of what they'd done to each other over Diane, never quite tumbling into that kind of a brawl) right down to the nuts and bolts of the situation. "Why you, Bo? Of all the men in town, what does Miranda want from you?"

The same thing it always boiled down to. _Why did she pick you and not me?_ For all that Luke liked to surround himself with some kind of impermeable armor, jealousy was always the chink. Any time a girl threatened to get serious about him, his cousin started wondering aloud just what was so great about Bo Duke.

It was enough to make a man forget why he cared about Luke's opinion anyway. And why he gave any merit to the objections of a man who hated everything.

(Oh, but Luke didn't hate everything. He liked wild drives in the General that tamed themselves into afternoons of fishing and swimming. He liked the archery contests made up by two foolish boys who'd agree on a target the size of a twig, then both miss by hilariously wide margins. He liked basketball and baseball and once upon a time he had liked skipping school. He liked outsmarting any dang fool that thought Hazzard was easy pickings, and he liked a good Boar's Nest brawl with Bo there by his side—

That was where all the lines of Luke's life intersected, actually. He seemed to like Bo by his side. Must, because Bo had never been Luke's real brother, and still he'd been kept close. Only problem was that Luke could walk away from Bo (and he had just about done so when Jud was staying with them, and though his brother was gone now, Luke – who never cried about anything – had come pretty close to tears at his departure) and still have family. Bo didn't have that same luxury, wouldn't until he made a family of his own.)

Luke – well, there was no arguing about it, the bars in front of him refuted any point he might make. Here he was, in trouble because of Miranda. Luke was right, but for all the wrong reasons.

Whatever had happened to Miranda, there was no doubt in Bo's mind that it wasn't her fault.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 2: Protection to person and property is the paramount duty of the government, and shall be impartial and complete.

"Tomorrow," was the compromise he made with Jesse. "After," the old man insisted, "we go see that new lawyer in town." Whose office wouldn't open until at least nine in the morning, robbing Luke of another two hours of daylight on top of the three he was about to lose this afternoon. Harvest could only wait but so long before food turned into compost, and the family was down one man already. If he was going to be grounded like a teenager with no more sense than the squirrels scrambling around the trunks of trees, at least he was going to install that tractor blade Bo had been forced to abandon when Rosco slapped the handcuffs on him. Jesse wasn't far off, picking corn by hand and watching out of the corners of those bloodshot eyes, just in case Luke decided to sneak off on the tractor at a whopping five miles per hour, engine roaring in complaint against the abuse.

Perhaps he should have flung his arms up in frustration, argued his point and sulked. It just might have eased Jesse's mind, but it would have been pretty close to a lie, and Dukes weren't allowed that luxury.

Those minutes he'd spent in the garage, cooling his heels with Cooter, had taken all the aggravation out of him. Or maybe it was listening to Daisy that did it, his arm around her in comfort or just to keep her still for a little while. She gave voice to every wild thought that tracked through her mind – about what had really happened, how Bo was being railroaded, how she and Luke were just going to have to prove their cousin's innocence – without thought to censoring herself. The more Daisy's half-baked plans revealed themselves (just as Bo's always did), the better aware Luke became that he had no good, solid leads to go on. A temporary sort of a setback, but a serious consideration all the same. Jesse's attempts at keeping Luke from scheming were actually having the opposite result. More time to work through all the possibilities of what had happened, a better chance to nudge the odds into Luke's own favor before taking action. Jesse had simply saved him from going off in Bo-Duke-style, let's-fix-it impetuosity. He'd have to remember to thank his uncle later.

He'd already screwed things up enough, just getting to this point. He kept stumbling over the same obstacles, ever since he'd come back from the military to find his cousins – both of them – with legs about twice as long as they'd been when he shipped out. Daisy was the easier equation to solve; her changes were largely superficial, long hair, short shorts and makeup disguising her tomboy interior. Her core was still there, lurking underneath with that same veiled fragility. She'd as soon kick the shins of whoever hurt her as she would nestle herself into Luke's arms for comfort. Or both, in exactly that order. And then she'd pull herself together, lift up her chin, and march right back out there to get hurt again.

Bo, well, all of Luke's biggest mistakes were made with Bo. The obvious ones, like giving bad navigational advice the night they'd managed to undo generations of Duke tradition by getting caught on a moonshine run, those were easier to manage than the ones he'd never fully understood.

Diane Benson – there was no way she should have been as successful in pulling the Dukes apart as she was. No one had gotten between him and Bo like that, not ever. In the end, Luke had apologized for his part in it, but he'd never fully understood what he was making amends for. He'd been protecting Bo, same as always, and he'd been proven right about the girl and how she was manipulating Bo. Less concerned with the safety of her drivers than the money she could bring in by using their names. Even if Bo's assessment of the situation was a little less blunt, it essentially jibed with Luke's: the carnival came first with Diane.

But the path back to each other had always been easy to follow – Jesse's well-worn trail of apologies and handshakes – so he'd bowed to the tradition. Maybe, he reasoned, it was easier on Bo that way. Luke took partial responsibility and Bo didn't have to feel like half the fool he really was when it came to pretty (and flattering) women.

Luke had been proven right about Diane, and the same thing was happening now with regard to that Miranda Taylor. With Diane, being right about her had been everything to Luke, the center of the whole struggle. If he could prove how right he was, Bo wouldn't make the dang fool jump and get his neck broken. That had been his mantra at the time, but in the end, his being right hadn't stopped the jump. It had only wrenched Bo back to his side, silent and heartbroken. Made a mess of their lives for a couple of weeks until Bo had relearned the rhythm of being a Duke boy, giving as good as he got instead of telling Luke he was dang sick of being picked on.

If he'd never really figured out what he had to be so sorry about with Diane, at least Luke had half a clue when it came to Miranda. Half a clue, but not a whole one, which was maybe worse. And the half he had didn't even make sense: it had something to do with her being better than Jud. Which was like worrying over whether cattle were better than sheep, really. Didn't matter, neither would ever turn a profit on Duke land, just like neither Jud nor Miranda would ever be permanent residents of Hazzard.

But something about Jud had gotten under Bo's skin, and there was really no one to blame that on but himself. He could claim concussion all he wanted, but in the end Bo had been thrown from the roof of a car and nearly drowned himself to save Jud, and the only reason he'd done it was because Luke had made such a big deal about having a brother. Must have been the shock that made his tongue almost as repetitive as Rosco's, stuttering "my brother" over and over again. That right there was a mistake he could recognize, but apologizing for it now would do no good.

Nope, he needed to get Bo out of this mess. Had to come up with a plan, and the only problem with that idea was that without more information he had no idea where to start.

So he settled his mind on a thought, simple chant kind of a thing, really. Exactly the kind of repetitive notion Bo always managed to hear even if it was never spoken out loud. _I'm coming, cousin_. Wasn't a lie, even it couldn't quite be the truth until tomorrow morning.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 3: No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, except by due process of law.

It was the kind of thing that made her want to swat Luke, push and shove at him until he—did something, anything. She knew better, of course. Trying to prod either of her cousins into doing anything they didn't want to was about as useful as reasoning with Maudine to walk a straight line when plowing. It'd just earn a girl a snort, followed by a stubborn refusal to do a single sensible thing.

It was one thing to acquiesce to Jesse's commands; the old man would never accept any other outcome. For all that their uncle couldn't quite make Luke's chin dip in shame the way it used to, he could still make the tough Marine in her cousin take a back seat. So long as he was carefully watched, Luke would obey. And Daisy could understand that.

What ate at her was how calmly Luke could accept to the order, over there humming to himself under the tractor. Like Bo wasn't in jail for a serious offense, like this wasn't Hazzard County, where Boss Hogg would be judge and jury. Executioner maybe not, Boss had no real taste for blood or violence, but sending her baby cousin off to prison for what could amount to life, that would just make the Commissioner's day, maybe even his whole week. There was no one that could stop him except the Dukes, and that would only happen if Luke would come out from under that tractor and start acting like a man who cared that his cousin was on his way up the river—

And that was where it all crumbled down to nothing more than the particles of dust below her feet. Because there was no doubt that Luke would do anything to save Bo from that fate, and whatever he came up with would probably work about as mysteriously as the way the soil of the farm managed to produce crop after crop of corn. Drought and locusts were a greater threat each year, and somehow there was always corn to harvest anyway, come October. And Luke would figure out how to get Bo out of this, using exactly the behavior he was exhibiting over there under the tractor: staying calm and plotting.

Didn't make it any easier on Daisy that Luke was so self-absorbed in the process of planning, not when she wanted justice – right now. She was going to have to figure out a way to keep from going crazy while Luke ticked on Hazzard time. She could do it though, and she would, because the minute Luke started to move, she was going to be right there by his side.


	3. Ten Quivers in His Liver

**Chapter Three – Ten Quivers in His Liver**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 4: No person shall be deprived of the right to prosecute or defend his own cause in any of the courts of this State, in person, by attorney, or both.**_

It was enough to put a quiver in a man's liver, or make him jump at the complaining bay of a basset hound. Hazzard had a real live (at least he hoped it was live, because that other thing would put ten quivers into his liver) missing person. And a suspect in the hoosegow.

It was everything he'd ever wanted, a genuine crime to be solved and a criminal to be tried and convicted. A feather in the cap of the back end of his career, maybe, and a reminder of the lawman he used to be. Back in the days before it became sport for whippersnappers to sass the law, when cars moved a little slower but were a lot more reliable, Rosco'd been the cock of the walk. He'd kept peace in this corner of Appalachia and been respected for it on both sides of the county's borders. Why, even that surly old revenuer, Buchanon, had given him that much credit – "You used to be the best sheriff in this state," he'd said, and Rosco had stopped listening to his words after that.

A bust like this one, followed by a conviction, and he wouldn't need Boss Hogg anymore. Oh, he'd keep his little fat buddy around just because the man didn't have any other friends, but he wouldn't have to knuckle under to him afterward. He could unkink his spine from where he'd been trying to stoop down to see eye to eye with the man.

"Rosco!" Speak of the devil. Loud voice in this echo chamber of a squad room, enough to wake the—

"Jit!" He needed some salt to throw over his shoulder, or to dig that old rabbit's foot out of his pants pocket and give it a few rubs – something to counter the thought that almost passed through his head. Instead, he wound up throwing flea powder all over his desk like a snowfall. What a waste; maybe he could get Flash to roll around in it later. For now she was just as impassive as ever, droopy eyes asking him why he had to respond to that smelly man with the nasty bark. Yeah well, her doggy num-nums had to get paid for somehow.

Besides, he wouldn't have made such a mess if not for the quiver that had set into his liver sometime after he walked away from the county building last night, and stayed there through the dark hours. It should have left with the sunrise, but it hadn't.

"Where's that dipstick deputy of yours?" It never had mattered whether Boss was talking about Enos, or his own flesh and blood, Cletus. All deputies were dipsticks. Not that Rosco would argue the point. Until those greedy-fat fists wanted to part with a few more simolians for the law-enforcement budget, Rosco would be stuck with whoever was cheap and loyal enough to serve beside him. Not like in his heyday when he'd had a half dozen or so men at his disposal.

"He's—uh," see, now, that flea powder took a huge chunk out of his wallet and it wasn't exactly doing its job sitting there on the table. Rosco tried shoving Flash across the surface to where she might actually get some on her. "Out there trying to solve the Taylor girl's disappearance." Funny how, for a smart police dog and all that, Flash seemed to have no idea what she was supposed to be doing. Those big, brown eyes were asking him why he was interrupting a perfectly good snooze.

"Well, why ain't_ you_ out there solving crime?" the fat man sneered at him, like a challenge. "You are the sheriff, ain't you?"

"Well Boss," had to answer quickly, the man didn't like to wait. "I's gonna, see, soon as I get my police dog there all set to sniff that girl out. Ij—Just look at that sniffer," he pulled Flash's ears away from her face to give the Boss a better look at her, "made for the hunt, a-gij-gij!" Now there were two pairs of big, brown eyes looking at him like he was speaking Greek. Which he wasn't, it was perfectly normal English, so neither Boss nor Flash had any right to pretend they didn't understand him. He picked up the flea powder again. If he was ever going to get the best deputy on his staff (who wasn't even officially paid for her position) on the case, he actually had to get some of the powder into her fur. "She'll find that girl," Rosco finished, all seriousness. Because if anyone in the sheriff's department could do it, it would be Flash.

"Uh-huh," Boss answered, stuffing the cigar back into his mouth from where he'd been holding it off to the side.

"Rowf!" was Flash's response to realizing she was sharing space with Boss Hogg, and more flea powder went flying.

"Jit!" Flea powder didn't exactly grow on trees.

"Get that flea-bag out of my squad room," Boss commented, casual as you please. As if the squad room wasn't Rosco's territory, as if Boss didn't have an office to retreat to. As if Flash wasn't worth her rather impressive weight in gold.

It rankled him, made him answer back, against his better judgment. "Now Boss," he started, with every intention of telling the man off. Stupid flea powder container was slippery, so he put it down. No need to go accidentally flinging the thing at his brother-in-law. "She wouldn't have fleas if you both wouldn't go scaring me like that." That was telling him. Both of them, really, because it was clear to him now how Boss and Flash had conspired together to make sure he never got any of the powder on his dog. They might pretend not to like each other, but his little fat buddy and his little dog had some kind of a scheme going—

"Uh huh," Boss answered again, dismissing him and Flash both, with a puff of smoke and a turn back to his office.

"Uh, Boss?" He probably shouldn't have told him off that way.

It was obviously a major sacrifice for Boss to turn his head back and acknowledge the presence of his sheriff, the man on the first line of defense when it came to protecting the Hazzard County Commissioner. "What, Rosco?" Interesting how that sneer on his face always changed his voice, twisted his accent up until there was no way on earth the man could make a normal sounding vowel.

"Don't it," hesitation there, not smart. Boss wouldn't be patient if he stumbled over his words. "Don't it kind of… feel funny," because there was too much fat insulating Boss's liver for it to ever quiver. "Knowing that girl could really be… gone?" He wasn't going to say that other word, the one that started with a d. "And Bo Duke…"

"Bo Duke didn't kill nobody," Boss scoffed at him. It was a strange admission from the man who had insisted that the boy be held on kidnapping and horse rustling charges, not to mention suspicion of… that h-word Rosco didn't even like to think about.

Maybe it meant—"Boss, uh, do you know where the girl is?" It would certainly save a lot of time, and even money, if Boss would just tell him where to find her. You'd think the man would want the case solved without spending another dime on the investigation.

"Rosco," was more scorn being heaped on the last pile. "I know Bo Duke didn't kill nobody because don't nobody kill nobody in Hazzard. I don't allow that kind of thing in my county." Well, that was comforting. And, oddly, true. "Besides, ain't no Duke ever going to go killing nobody. That girl is—" white puff of smoke trailing after Boss's waving hand, "somewhere, and you got to find her. So's people don't get—" Rosco thought the man's face had been twisted up in disgust before, but the shape it took now topped derision and went straight to mockery. "Quivers in their livers. And start looking over their shoulders." Oh, right. That wouldn't do at all, the people of Hazzard becoming suspicious. A sneaky man could steal their money right out of the bank, re-appropriate their Christmas trees then sell them right back to them, make personal use of county funds, and set up his own chop shop to hack apart their cars or motorbikes, and they wouldn't blink or spend a moment worrying about it. But a missing girl—

"Soon as I feed the prisoner," he said, but he was talking to his dog, as it turned out. Somewhere in the time his nimble mind had worked over that last set of thoughts, Boss had walked back into his office and shut the door. "Ijit," he added, and he didn't know if it was the end of his last sentence or the beginning of the next. "You just wait here, girl," he advised. Flash might have snored in response.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 5: Every person charged with an offense against the laws of this State shall have the privilege and benefit of counsel; shall be furnished, on demand, with a copy of the accusation, and a list of the witnesses on whose testimony the charge against him is founded; shall have compulsory process to obtain the testimony of his own witnesses; shall be confronted with the witnesses testifying against him; and shall have a public and speedy trial by an impartial jury.

Two boys. Sometimes he wanted to scold his brothers for leaving him with two boys and a girl instead of the other way around. Only for a minute at a time, though, because he loved all three of the children he'd raised – for who they were and for the brothers they reminded him of. All the same, as much as having two boys was useful when it came to farming, it was dang near impossible to keep both of them safe and sound at the same time.

It skirted the edges of doable, so long as they stayed together. When Jesse's attentions didn't have to be divided, when they could keep some semblance of an eye on each other (when they could goad each other to ever more foolish stunts, but somehow they always survived those). The real challenge was handling them when they'd been separated.

Used to be, he thought of it as punishment to make his boys stay away from each other after they done some dang-fool thing like getting their backsides filled with buckshot following some mischief. Young teens, all those missing watermelons, and _no sir, we wasn't misbehaving, we was just having fun._ Jesse'd sent Bo off to the barn to perform solo chores while Luke got sentenced to cooling his heels in their bedroom. Seemed like a fine plan – Bo was no fan of chores and Luke didn't exactly relish sitting still – but it turned out to be a rookie mistake. Bo got himself kicked by the mule while Luke systematically destroyed their room. Nothing violent about it, he just took every bit of furniture apart to its component pieces. When Jesse brought a crying Bo inside to lie down on his bed, they found Luke on the floor with metal rods, casters, box springs, mattresses, screws and—Jesse stopped categorizing and took Bo out to the couch to rest instead. Followed by an absolutely infuriated Luke who wanted to blame Jesse's punishment for Bo's injury, but in the end the boy couldn't help but blame himself.

The whole scene was a spectacularly glowing Wrong Way sign, and he'd gotten too far down the road to back out of it. Just had to pull a one-eighty right there on the spot and resort back to the tried and true. Next time they came home, souls heavy with unspoken confessions, he whipped them. Took them both right out to the barn and tanned their hides like the little boys they shouldn't have been anymore. Worked like a charm, them watching each other pay the price for foolish deeds, and right there he vowed never to let them get too far from each other again. Of course, that was before Luke and the Marines and war…

No time for an old man's sepia-tinged memories. Funny how even the bad could look good because it was the past and resolved, one way or another. Luke might not be the same boy he'd been when Jesse saw him off at the bus station all those years ago, but he was safe and home, even if his disposition tended toward the surly. It was a happy enough ending, and might be more than he could hope for with regard to Bo right now. Unless he did right by the boy.

"Luke," he hollered, and it wasn't gentle, either. That particular nephew was fighting him every step of the way, like he didn't know there was a proper way to dress when you went to town on business, like he thought if he showed up for breakfast in those jeans that were just about worn through, Jesse would leave him behind. He'd been sent back to dress himself properly for meeting a professional man and discussing his felony-facing cousin's future, and now he was dragging his boots about it.

Bo was about as close to safe as he was going to get at the moment, with bars and the Hazzard law surrounding him. Luke was looking to go out and get himself killed at the first opportunity, tracking down who-knew-what-kind of monster that would bring harm to an innocent little thing like Miranda Taylor. Sweet enough girl, even if she did come between Jesse's boys a bit. It wasn't her fault that Bo and Luke were still undergoing those same growing pains they'd never stopped having when it came to settling down. Jesse reckoned it was only a matter of time before Bo lost interest in her. But before that could happen, she'd disappeared, leaving Bo all but accused of her murder.

A man would have to be a fool to open a law practice in Hazzard. Jesse'd said those words himself, or echoed them when Sunshine passed them at him over the checkerboard. There was no need for lawyers in a county where there were Duke boys, making sure no crime ever got so far as to need defending. Fools that they were, the senior generation of Hazzard never considered what would happen if a Duke boy needed legal defense.

Well, Jesse was out of that denial now, and working overtime to try to yank Luke out of it, too. Daisy, of course, was dressed appropriately for such an important meeting as they were about to have, with this Gary Butler who was fool enough to start a law practice in Hazzard. For all that his girl had an errant mouth sometimes, and a stubborn streak that his boys were in awe of, she knew when it was time to give up a needless struggle and pull together as a family.

"Luke!" The boy wasn't as aloof as he could sometimes seem. It was just that his brain worked like quick-set concrete. Formed itself into a shape it had no intentions of relenting from, a plan from which he wouldn't waver until it was proven fruitless. "I expect you out there and in that pickup in three minutes." Didn't have to mention again how he expected the boy to be, if not in his Sunday clothes, at least decent-looking. Jesse would be in his overalls for this visit, but they were fresh, clean, and topped off with his black jacket. Luke could manage to find some jeans where the seat wasn't about to fall out.

"I," came from the boys' bedroom, followed by the door squealing open. Luke frowned at the sound or the hinge, and if he thought he was going to get out of going to see this lawyer on the excuse that the bedroom door needed a little oil, that boy had another think coming. But Luke managed to pull himself away from his deep study of noisy doors and join them in the living room. At last, and he passed Jesse's inspection, too. Crisp looking jeans and a blue, cotton shirt the likes of which Luke hadn't worn in a few years. Made him look somewhere near the gentleman Jesse had gone gray in the process of raising him to be. "Was going to take the General," he finally got around to saying.

For a flickering second he considered fighting the boy on it, thought for a minute he might dole out some kind of lecture about sticking together and—

They didn't have all day. "You take Daisy, then." It would ensure no detours along the way. "And go straight to that Butler's office. Luke," pointing fingers seemed to be all the effort he needed to put out these days. The whip, though it wouldn't do any good to tell his boys this fact, had been permanently retired years ago. "Mind me."

It was there on the boy's face to fight him. But – "Yes, sir," Luke sighed.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 6: No person shall be compelled to give testimony tending in any manner to incriminate himself.

_He's just a kid._ It was his first thought and it made him wonder how much one night in jail (and one strange noon of being questioned by Rosco, the man muttering all along about how he was supposed to get a lunch break, but he couldn't take it until he found that Taylor girl; why wouldn't Bo just confess and get it over with?) could change a fellow. Because the man Jesse was introducing him to, apparently his new lawyer, wasn't any younger than Luke. Not a kid, just surprisingly young for the job description. This was the man who was supposed to help Bo get out of a felony charge.

Luke's silent stance in the far corner spoke louder than all of Jesse's reassurances. Bo didn't like that tight set to his cousin's jaw, how far away he was. Wanted Luke closer, but his attention was being crowded out by his uncle and this Gary Butler. Funny that the Dukes hadn't met him before today; he figured they ought to have run into him somewhere.

"Don't," the man was saying, and Bo wouldn't be paying him much attention, except Rosco had dangled the evidence in front of him only an hour earlier. He'd never much liked that old brown jacket, wouldn't have cared if Miranda lost it in the woods. But it was stained with blood, and no one knew where the girl had gotten off to. Seemed like a genuine lawyer might not be the worst thing he could have in this situation. "Submit to questioning again without me or your uncle present."

Now if the man had spent any of the apparently two months he'd been in the county actually working as any kind of counsel, he'd know that Rosco wasn't anything to worry about, not really. Or maybe Bo only knew that because he'd seen how the sheriff stopped stuttering, lost his affectations, got watery eyed and asked Bo to give him whatever information he could that would lead to finding the girl. Rosco was just as lost as the rest of them in this mess, just as sacred. Bo didn't exactly know who the threat was, but it wasn't Rosco.

"I'm sorry, y'all." And that was Enos emerging from the stairwell, also no danger to the Dukes. "But can't no one but counsel be down here with the prisoner for more than a half hour. And it's been—"

"It ain't been no half hour," Luke growled. Brave man or a fool, Enos didn't flinch, just flashed his guileless grin and nodded his head reflexively.

"I know it ain't Luke, but it's getting close. I just thought you might like some warning," he added, but he wasn't looking at Luke anymore. His eyes had traveled to Daisy, like a bee discovering to the glossiest flower in the field. "So's you could say your goodbyes." Daisy was hanging close to Jesse, showing no signs of flirting today. Must have ruined Enos' whole morning, but he didn't let on. "Five minutes now, Luke, Daisy. You can stay, Uncle Jesse."

"I ain't your Uncle Jesse," the old man answered, but it was distracted, merely habit. The room was tense with worry, and it radiated out from his uncle's tight shoulders.

It wasn't anything Bo wanted, for his family to be spending money they didn't have to defend him against charges that they all knew were false. But for all that he thought he and Luke had been accused of every charge known to man, he'd had to admit to himself that no one had ever dangled a blood-stained jacket in front of him before.

Daisy stepped up to the bars to kiss his cheek and rub his shoulder. "Don't you worry none, cousin," she said, trying to soothe, but there was an angry edge to her voice. "They can't keep you in here, not without some proof you done something wrong. And they ain't gonna find none, neither!" That last was aimed at Enos no doubt, the way she just about shouted it. It was a waste of breath; unlike Rosco, Enos wouldn't be eavesdropping from the stairs.

Bo grabbed that skinny little hand before it could snake back out from between the bars. "Don't you worry, sweetheart," he consoled right back. This was how things worked with his female cousin. Reassurances and expressions of frustration right out there on the surface. Seemed like all Daisy needed was a mirror of her own feelings and she'd feel better. "I'll be out before you know it." He squeezed her hand and let her go.

Luke was there in the space that Daisy had just vacated, without Bo even having seen him move. "Bo," he said, and though it wasn't a whisper it was the kind of quiet that made smart men back away and distract themselves from listening. His cousin could create privacy in the middle of a Memorial Day Parade crowd. "I'm going to get you out." He didn't say any more, barely paused long enough to reach a hand between the bars to touch him, a squeeze somewhere to his arm or shoulder, and then he was gone.

Leaving Bo with his counsel, which was just Jesse and the man who was scarcely older than any of the Duke cousins. Bo had a strong feeling that Luke would get him out before the due process of law managed to free him.

"Now, Bo," and Gary Butler, who Bo didn't trust enough to call Gary yet and didn't expect to ever refer to as Counselor Butler, "we're going to have to be completely honest with one another." Here it came, the did-you-do-it questions that he figured were inevitable. Part of the man's job and nothing to take offense to, and yet—"So I'll start. The horse-rustling charges, they're not substantially different from auto theft, and I've worked on that kind of case before. But kidnapping… I've got no experience." Had he been standing any other place but this one stained square of concrete, looking at a face that probably didn't even need to be shaved to be that kind of smooth, framed by hair that would fit on any college boy, wearing a coat and tie that looked about as natural on him as a dress would on Luke – if he weren't behind bars with the threat of a lifetime there, he would have laughed. "I'm going to have to find a partner to help me defend you, Bo."

Yeah. Bo's money, if he'd had even a dime to his name, would be on Luke to fix this thing.


	4. Moon Promises

**Chapter Four – Moon Promises**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 7: Neither banishment beyond the limits of the State, nor whipping, as a punishment for crime, shall be allowed.**_

Lawyers, and this shouldn't have come as a surprise to any Duke, but Jesse couldn't see straight for all the worrying he was doing, were a waste of time. A waste of money, too, but that was almost secondary. Wouldn't be, not if they couldn't figure out getting the rest of the crop harvested and sold, but that could wait a few days. If there was one thing Luke could thank the service for, it was teaching him priorities. Deal with the enemy that's shooting at you now before worrying about who might try to kill you tomorrow.

Forty-eight hours Bo had been behind bars, and all of Luke's promises about getting him out were becoming just so many lies. The kind of thing he ought to get whipped for, misleading his cousin that way, except Jesse was an accomplice to this little crime. Not on purpose, none of it was deliberate, but the more outsiders got involved in the situation, the worse it felt. All these people suddenly tangled into their lives: Benjamin Taylor screaming foul play, Old Man Miller not blaming Bo but still condemning him in his befuddled little way, Boss and Rosco out for blood, and now this Gary Butler trying to ride in on a white steed to do what was right for Bo, except he didn't know how, was going to have to bring in some friend from Washington to help out. Ought to be impressive, the lengths people were going to in pursuit of whatever their particular interests were with regard to Bo.

Except it wasn't, because Luke knew the answer, clear as day. Bo didn't need fancy lawyers from the country's capitol, what he needed was his family. And time.

Forty-eight hours Bo had been locked up, and Luke only got to see him for a grand total of one hour. An hour of shared time, interrupted by lawyers and deputies. What was that in comparison to the great spans of time that Bo was alone in his small square, with only bars for company? Somewhere after that first day, they'd even seen fit to move him away from the window. The moon, it was the thing that had always connected them, from the first time Luke camped out with friends, leaving Bo behind. About the only way he'd gotten out the door without a whining blonde boy melded to his side was the moon-promise he made: that if Bo looked at the moon after Aunt Lavinia put him to bed, Luke would be looking at it, too. They'd do that together, even if they were apart. It was cute, maybe childish. Then again, moon-promises had seen him through some pretty dark times, looking up through the smoke of jungle fires to see it glowing there and remembering that somewhere on the other side of the earth, Bo was watching it through the safe glass that covered their bedroom window. Reminded him of why it was so important to stay alive, that he had a home to go back to. Silly thing, and Bo probably didn't remember it anymore anyway, so there was no point in reminding him of moon-promises, not when he'd been put in the windowless cell anyway.

So he wouldn't say anything about it in the ten minutes he'd secured with Bo, alone. A half hour visitation, split three ways, because Jesse no longer counted as counsel. His kin hadn't been too keen on the ten-minutes-each approach, not until Luke had negotiated the most important part. He convinced Rosco – who seemed oddly willing – that so long as they took turns, there was no harm in letting each of them into the cell with Bo.

Which made touching possible, nothing between them now as Bo hugged him tight. Luke indulged him, reckoned it was wise to waste a precious minute this way. Physical contact was Bo's oxygen; too little and he'd turn blue. Two days of almost nothing, and Luke had taken the first ten minute shift with Bo. Made perfect sense that his cousin would just about suffocate him in those earliest seconds, but it was tolerable, so long as it let his younger cousin relax.

"Bo," he said, because ten minutes was a desperately short span of time, couldn't all be dedicated to a hug. "Let's sit." On the same cot that had accommodated both of them more times that he could count. Flat mattress that did nothing to add cushion against the metal supports underneath, felt almost like home when his hind end landed there, Bo's arm still slung across his shoulders.

A smile, Luke didn't deserve the warmth of that gesture, not when he'd made no progress towards Bo's release. Got it anyway, because Bo wanted to give it to him, he guessed. "It's good to see you, Luke." Heartbreaking, how that sounded like the kind of thing that got said to relatives you saw only at Christmas.

"Bo," he said again. Had to clear his throat, but it was only because he wanted to be understood, had nothing to do with how much he was going to hate walking out of here in eight minutes. "I need you to help me out, now." Had to move his head back to catch Bo's eyes, had to make his cousin's grip relent enough for that to happen. Felt a reluctant sort of a release when he pulled away, but he got what he wanted.

Strange how Bo was taller, but still managed to look up at him. Must be slouching, and it made him look so young again, like a twelve-year-old trusting that Luke could get them out of a whipping for skipping school.

"You got to tell me anything you can think of about where Miranda could be." Because yesterday had been a complete failure. And while he might like to complain that Daisy's insistence on joining him in searching out Harper's Woods for any sign of the horses or the girl had slowed him down, that just wasn't the case. Their female cousin could hold her own and if Luke wasted time worrying about her, that was his own fault. No, the problem was simple, really. He had no idea where to start.

That little bit of space Luke had wanted a few seconds ago suddenly opened up into a chasm, and Bo had stalked as far from him as the confines of the cell that they were locked into would let him get. "I don't know, Luke!" Accusing sound to his voice, or maybe just frustrated. "Don't you think if I knew, I would have told someone by now?"

Seven minutes, and he didn't have time for an emotional outburst. Had to stamp out the urge to tell Bo to settle down; it would only work the other way. So he stood up instead, walked up to his cousin and rested his hands on those shoulders.

"All right," he agreed. "Then just," he didn't have time to calm the boy down. "Come, sit back down, and tell me about her. Anything you want, just tell me."

Got a sigh so heavy it had to hurt Bo's chest to let it out, but he came and settled on the cot again. Different posture, less natural, Luke's arm across Bo's shoulders this time. A quick nod, another sigh, and, "She don't really like Benjamin all that much." Well, that was interesting. Her brother, her own flesh and blood and she didn't like him? "I mean, she loves him, I guess. She just complained that he was—like he acted like he was her father or something. Bossy. And she was getting frustrated about it."

Five minutes, and Bo was going mute on him. Luke was going to have to nudge him some more. "Ain't they got a father?" Didn't seem like he remembered hearing that she'd lost any of her folks, just moved away from them.

"Yeah, but ever since they left home, Benjamin started acting—I don't think she likes her father all that much either. Or, she loves him, but doesn't like living under his roof. And Benjamin was getting the same way." Bo was relaxing under his arm, tilting his head closer like they were little boys whispering secrets. "Her other brother, or one of them, was going to be coming up to stay with them soon. Wilburn, I think. Anyways, she was looking forward to that. Figured it would give Benjamin something else to do besides look out for her. Or—" Bo's rhythm picked up here. "It wasn't just looking out for her. It was like—remember how Daisy got tired of us protecting her last year?"

Who could forget? She'd wound up kidnapped and just about married off to Milo Beaudry. And he and Bo had taken the beating of a lifetime to get her back.

"Couldn't be Milo that kidnapped Miranda," Bo added, proving his mind was running the same track as Luke's. "Them Beaudrys is in prison."

"No, I'm sure it ain't Milo," Luke agreed. "Anything else you can tell me? Like maybe if she ever went anywhere to get away from Benjamin?" Could be the girl had just run off, maybe she'd even 'borrowed' Orren Miller's horses to do it. The bloody jacket, well there had to be some other explanation for that.

Bo shook his head, just about rested it on Luke's shoulder. This time he'd carved out for them was coming to an end, and two farm boys who'd hardly ever had a need for a watch between them knew it. "Nope," he answered. "Just places she went with me. The pond, Harper's Woods, Bronson's Canyon. No place special."

Bo's arm snaked around his back, and Luke gave in. His cousin had no useful information, or if he did, it was the kind of thing he didn't know would make any difference. So Luke just slipped his other arm around Bo and held on, because his cousin needed it.

"I'll figure it out, cuz," he promised. Knew he shouldn't, there were already too many broken promises between them. "I'll get you out."

A shove against his chest, where Bo's right hand had been resting. "Not," he said, "if it's going to get you hurt."

"Don't worry," Luke tried but Bo's head was shaking against the notion.

"If I go to prison," and there was no way in hell either of them was going to think about that, not now when they only had two minutes left. Luke tried to shush the words, but Bo talked right over him. "Luke, if I go to prison, it'll be—I don't want to go to prison." Right, they agreed on that part. "But if I did, I'd still be alive, and it would only take time," more time than either of them wanted to think about, probably, "before I got out and I could see you again. But if you got hurt or—" Again, shushing didn't seem to be working. "If anything really happened to you and I couldn't see you again—"

"Ain't gonna happen, Bo," he said, because if shushing wouldn't work, there was always raising his voice over his cousin's. "I ain't never gonna leave you behind." For more than a day or two, he amended. But silently, in his head, where he knew all the obstructions to getting Bo free. The cold trails and the Hazzard law and the needle he was going to have to pull out of a county-sized haystack. He didn't say any more, just pulled Bo back into a hug, because they were about to be yanked apart, and Bo didn't like to be alone.

"I'm sorry, Luke, Bo," came the timid call from the stairwell. Enos announcing that time was up, and it was Daisy's turn. Must've been the deputy's undying love for their female cousin that made him brave enough to say anything at all. "Luke, you got to go now."

He nodded, but Bo kept holding onto him, so Luke stayed right where he was. Daisy could give up half a minute until Bo was ready to let him go.

"Luke," he said, and it was going to be heartbreaking. Something about staying here, he was sure, not leaving him alone for another minute. The muscles in his arms tightened without consulting his brain, holding Bo tighter. "Can't breathe."

Well. Okay. He let go, at least enough for Bo to get a deep breath.

"She talked sometimes about all them old cabins up there on the old Porter's Ridge. How they looked so sweet if only someone would fix them up." It was a whisper, then Bo gave up his grip, swatted Luke's backside to get him moving. "Now git," he said, and it was an attempt at bravery.

"I'm gone," Luke answered, and that was an attempt at humor. Both failed, but Luke managed to stand up from the cot and let himself be led away from his cousin by the sheriff's deputy.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 8: No person shall be put in jeopardy of life or liberty more than once for the same offense, save on his, or her own motion for a new trial after conviction, or in case of mistrial.

"Hey sweetheart," was Bo's best crack at courage. But his smile, he had to work too hard at it, and even with all the effort, it barely got past being a grimace. For all that her cousin could play poker with the best of them, it had to be skill with cards that got him his wins, because it sure wasn't like he could ever hide what he was feeling.

She stepped through the open cell door and it was only habit and careful upbringing that made her remember to thank Enos before dropping the basket she'd carried in to the floor and finding herself engulfed by Bo's long arms. Listened to Enos' tiptoeing footsteps away; a gentleman as always, trying not to intrude.

"Hey, sugar," she said into Bo's chest.

Luke was about as sensitive as a buzz saw, Jesse always said, and Daisy would be the last to argue against that point. However, if she hadn't been happy about the notion of only ten minutes with her baby cousin, she had to admit their older cousin was right. Bo needed to be this close to each one of them.

"I brought you some fried chicken," she said. It was proof of how poorly Bo was taking to confinement, that he hadn't smelled it on his own, or if he had, he was more interested in hugging her than eating it. "And potato salad," she added. It was words, sound, something to cover up the sniffling sounds. "There's even," and she pushed herself back from where she'd just wiped her eyes on Bo's shirt. Yep, telltale mascara marks, and she'd be sure to bring him another one this afternoon. She'd have to leave it upstairs, but Enos would see that Bo got it. Or Rosco would, because even the sheriff had no heart to refuse simple favors when it came to Bo Duke. "A slice of gooseberry pie."

Bo nodded down at her, eyes holding hers. "You all right, sweetheart?"

She could see now how Miranda Taylor would swoon under that look, how Bo being strong made a girl feel all the more tender towards him.

"I'm fine," she said, blinking back whatever further tears had plans of dripping from her eyes. Because she wasn't Miranda, and she didn't need Bo to be a knight in shining armor for her. Daisy was here to take care of her cousin, not let him comfort her. "Now you sit and eat."

He wanted to refuse, it was all over his face. Strange sight, Bo Duke trying to figure out a way to skip a meal. "Daisy," he started, but there would be none of that. Luke wouldn't let her touch him, didn't want to hear a single consoling word, and Jesse kept insisting on comforting her. Daisy was quickly running out of menfolk to care for, and there was no way on earth Bo Duke was going to escape her need to take care of someone, somehow.

"It's halfway cold already," she said, pushing against that big old chest, shoving until Bo's calves hit the edge of the cot. "And it ain't gonna wait another minute." That was better, Bo was sitting now. Daisy squatted at his feet and opened the basket. Napkin first, which she just barely restrained herself from tucking into his collar. Left that on his lap and started unloading the food around him onto the cot.

She managed, though it wasn't easy, not to stand over him and tap her foot while he took his first few bites.

For all his attempts to be brave, he'd lost everything. His freedom, the company of his family, his girl. She'd be danged if he was going to lose weight, too.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Chapter 9: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted; nor shall any person be abused in being arrested, while under arrest, or in prison.

Luke was a danged fool if he thought his motives were anything other than transparent. The boy was just lucky that there was some sound logic behind the case he presented. There was also a certain amount of good timing working in his nephew's favor. Jesse'd kept him tied down long enough that he figured Luke's blind need to protect Bo had passed, allowing his more meticulous side to take over the planning. The old man (whose toe had ached so strongly for so many days in a row now that he was starting to think amputation might just be the only relief) always considered Luke the best weapon in the Dukes' arsenal; he just wanted to keep the boy from getting himself killed by marching off into battle with nothing but his protective streak as armor.

There was a certain brilliance to Luke's plan, letting them each get this kind of access to Bo. And a kind of wisdom in having Jesse bat cleanup, because it was a mess. Bo sitting there at the center of a half-eaten meal, looking just as miserable as he had that day he left the farm for that stay with the Carnival of Thrills, after that heart-stopping fistfight with Luke.

"Boy," he said, not caring that Enos hadn't locked the door behind them yet, that they weren't in anything like a private setting. Opened his arms and didn't have to ask this child to come to him. He never had; Bo was always the one that hung tight to his family, in joy and sadness.

The bars clanged behind him as he held onto his baby boy, too big for old arms to reach comfortably around anymore, but Jesse did his boyscout best to make sure his youngest knew that he was loved.

"I ain't," Bo said, close to his ear. Had to be stooped in the least comfortable way; Jesse could feel the odd curvature to his back as he ran his hand up and over it. "I ain't real hungry, Uncle Jesse."

Made him laugh, made him want to cry. His adult of a child was asking permission not to finish his meal. It was cute and tried to pull at his nostalgic heartstrings, but it fell apart before it ever got there. Because never in his uncle's memory had Bo Duke walked away from a half-eaten meal.

"You'll get hungry later," was wisdom in the form of a compromise. Daisy had obviously seen the boy eat a few bites; it might just keep her from overfeeding the rest of the family. And anyone could see that Jesse didn't need a mama-bird of a niece cramming any more food down his gullet. "I don't reckon it's going to do you any good to go missing meals, though. It ain't gonna get you out of here no faster."

Bo took half a step back, not exactly letting go, just making enough space to answer him. "No, sir, it ain't. I just ain't hungry now, is all."

"Put it away for later, then," was Jesse's suggestion. "Just promise me you won't go feeding it to Rosco. Daisy would just about throw a fit if she knew you did that." That there was the truth, and more likely than not, Jesse would be at the receiving end of her fury, what with Bo locked away from her. "You might just get away with sharing it with Enos, though."

Bo laughed, in a polite way that acknowledged Jesse's attempt a humor. No rolling mirth to it whatsoever, but it reflected Bo's best effort. Must have cheered the boy up enough that he managed to let go of Jesse.

"Bo." This conversation should be taking place sitting down. Or maybe he was just tired from trying to corral two of his kids while worrying about the third. Then there was the corn crop out there in the sun, half harvested and the rest getting ready to go rotten unless they all got out to it pretty soon. Whatever it was, though he understood Luke's logic in having him be the last one Bo saw, and where he appreciated Daisy's attempt to feed the boy, the result was that the one piece of furniture in the room was currently serving as the kitchen table and not the chair Jesse might have wanted it to be. "Don't worry, son." Hands up, because he was going to get interrupted with denials or declarations unless he staved them off. "I know you ain't got nothing to do all day but think and worry. But it ain't going to help nothing if you go stewing about things you can't control. Luke—he's gonna do his part, you know it and I know it. And he'll be careful," which might have been a white lie, but that was okay. It was the same white lie Jesse had told himself when Luke laid out his transparent plan, the one that kept everyone busy visiting Bo while Luke slipped out of the courthouse alone. Stubborn fool that boy was, but he wasn't half as clever as he thought.

Bo was nodding, keeping quiet. Not exactly normal, but then again, nothing much had been, not since the law had seen fit to lock his blonde sunshine boy away.

"And meanwhile, Gary Butler is bringing in that guy he told you about yesterday. From Washington. One way or another, we'll get you out."

"Uncle Jes—"

"Now don't you go telling me how we can't afford it," he scolded, eyebrows down, steady stare. "I got a little bit stashed away—"

"That's supposed to be for—"

Jesse waved his hand in the air. He knew full well what it was for: "A rainy day. And ain't been no days rainier than these last few, boy. I ain't about to let you go," anywhere, really, but especially not to prison, "if'n I can stop it. Besides," he smiled here, had to or they were both going to cry. "It's what's left of the money you brought home from NASCAR."

Bo nodded, didn't say anything else. That boy should have been arguing, not because he was right, but just because he was Bo. He had an opinion, and it was a strong one, about everything. But he stayed quiet, listening – just like Jesse was – to the nonexistent ticking of time wearing away from them.

Luke was the smartest fool Jesse had ever known, leaving him for the last shift with the boy. Letting him clean up the mess like it was so much milk, spilled on the floor. Just about the time he heard footsteps echoing in the stairwell, Jesse pulled his boy back into his arms.

"Don't you worry about nothing, Bo. We'll get you out." Seemed like something he'd said an awful lot, lately.


	5. The Great Hazzard Haystack

**Chapter Five – The Great Hazzard Haystack**

**Interlude 1: Inalienable Rights**

_**I. Life**_

"Rosco," Bo tried, because it had been two days. More than a straight two, for that matter; it was morning when the sheriff showed up with that egg-sucking grin and cuffs at the ready. It had been two days this morning, and now it was headed toward three. That long of sitting and waiting, maybe pacing, and the occasional trip to the bathroom. "Even in prison," oh, he shouldn't have said that, look how happy the idea made Rosco. "Which this ain't, but even in prison, they give you some time in the exercise yard."

The sheriff was caught there for just a moment, probably having impressive daydreams of running a prison and treating his dipstick guards almost as poorly as the prisoners. Strange tip to his head and then, "Oh fiddle-dee-dee, Bo Duke. I ain't falling for that load of poppycock."

"Falling for—Rosco!" It was irritated, frustrated, giving away for free the kind of reaction the sheriff would have had to work for hours to earn from Luke. "It ain't," but he couldn't lower himself to speaking gibberish, "a load of nothing. I was just thinking maybe you could—never mind." Because there was no finishing that sentence. There was nothing the law of Hazzard could do for him, no way they could trust him beyond the confines of his cell and the carefully executed excursions into the locker room to use the facilities. It was, in a way, his own fault. His and Luke's; they'd pulled too many tricks, schemed too successfully for him to be given any liberties now. Not when everyone really reckoned he was guilty. (But of what? Where the hell was Miranda?)

It was just that he was twice as antsy now. All he'd wanted was time to be close to his family, and like he could see right through Bo's skull (must've been mind-reading, actually, they hadn't time alone together to say two words) Luke had gotten it arranged. Planned it and executed it, and like Christmas morning, it was over before Bo could enjoy it. Or maybe he was a fool to think he should have gotten any pleasure from it, because it was nothing more than a tease. Being a Duke meant never having a moment to himself, and most days that was just fine with Bo. And then there was today with only thirty minutes of company and then it was done. Seemed like cruel and unusual punishment to him.

Almost, but not quite, felt like he had nothing to lose. Because this was no kind of a life, stuck in a concrete square without even enough room to stretch his legs.

Rosco sighed, taking two steps closer to the bars. But the man was smart, or at least trainable. He'd learned not to get close enough that Bo could get ahold of any part of him. "Bo," he said, and it was serious, quiet. Not the blustering fool in hot pursuit (then again, maybe he'd gotten that way by breathing in too much tail-pipe exhaust as the Dukes sped away from him), just Mama Coltrane's boy. "You—if you know where that girl is," a breath, a headshake and earnest eyes, light as Luke's but not half as blue, looking at him. "You really don't know where that girl is, do you?"

That girl, as the old-timers would say, wasn't more than a slip of a thing. (_Too skinny,_ Luke would have agreed, back in the days when they'd debated girls with a certain kind of reckless abandon that no longer existed in a world where he'd up and left home over the likes of one Diane Benson.) Defenseless against anything of real consequence, probably. He didn't know if she had the hidden strength of the likes of Daisy, who could smile pretty one minute, then flip a man over her shoulder the next. He'd never seen Miranda fight, always reckoned he'd protect her before anyone could even get close to harming her. Didn't have a clue where she'd hide if she was afraid, either, if there was a threat she had to run away from.

Between Luke's questions and Rosco's, he was starting to feel like he didn't know Miranda Taylor very well at all. But one thing he did know – knew it because not knowing it would be too hard to bear when he was trapped in this space that smelled of decay and abandonment – was that wherever she was, Miranda was alive.

Gary Butler had told him not to talk, to answer no questions without his counsel present. Just went to show how little the lawyer knew Hazzard, really. This man in front of him was as familiar as family. Wrong side of the bars, but he was just rusty old Rosco.

"No," he concurred. Funny way to agree, the kind of contradictory thing Luke would do. "I don't know where she is."

"All right," Rosco answered, firm nod to his head and eyes still watching through the bars, eyeing the way his prisoner didn't flinch or twitch or whatever the man's worn out policing skills told him would mean Bo was lying. Then he took a step back, stumbled and, "Ijit! Don't you—don't you threaten me!" But he wasn't talking to Bo, it was a dust mote on the floor, a crack in the concrete or whatever he believed had tried to trip him up. The Duke boy was barely worth one more glance as the man headed for the stairs and up towards the life above. "You just—you stay put, now. You can exercise right there in your cell, you ain't got to go…" There was more hiccupped muttering, but the details were lost to the echo of the emptiness around him.

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II. Liberty

It wasn't nice, the way he got free. It was sneaky, or it would have been if Jesse hadn't been giving him that steely stare that announced he could see right through Luke's plan to its core. But, for all that he knew the ulterior motives, his uncle wasn't going to stop it. Maybe the man just wanted a chance to hold his baby boy; Luke could appreciate that.

When it came to Daisy, though, his plan had been mean and underhanded. Ten minutes with Bo in exchange for Luke slipping out of the courthouse without her. She wanted to be out here looking for clues and hints and skinny little needles of a girl in the great Hazzard haystack. Luke knew that, just like he knew she'd set to feeding Bo eventually. If he'd been a kind man, he would have made sure she got to do both. But kindness had no place in a world where Bo was facing down charges the likes of which no Duke had ever dealt with. And his female cousin had no place being in the line of fire where clearing Bo was concerned. Oh, she wanted to be, always craved being in the thick of whatever he and Bo got themselves into. And it always led to her getting hurt, maybe not physically, but somehow she consistently managed to get her heart broken. Wasn't logical that it should turn out that way, didn't even make sense that she could find someone to give her heart to for the breaking, but then most things involving women weren't known for being simple.

Which was probably an excuse; maybe for once he only wanted to worry about keeping himself safe. Because these old cabins up here on Porter's Ridge held more danger than the Boar's Nest on a payday weekend. Dark corners and shattered windows, rotten floorboards. Not to mention how Daisy didn't like spiders, bats or snakes, and these remnants of the homes of men who'd built the railroad through Hazzard easily a hundred years ago simply writhed all kinds of creatures. He didn't need his cousin out here screaming her little lungs out and attracting attention. Whose attention, he wasn't sure, but the way Duke luck ran, it wouldn't be Miranda that she drew out from hiding.

Loose slate under his feet, slipped and rattled down the ridge a ways, just to remind him that this was risky business for him, too. Hazzard had a lot of forgotten back country, places that used to matter, but where no one much bothered to go anymore. Decided maybe he should walk the floor of the ridge, where a girl and horse could wind up, hurt and beyond screaming range of the nearest occupied part of Hazzard, with just one misstep, one stumble, then tumble and fall.

Afraid of what he might find, but more so of what he might not, Luke made his way down below the cabin line.

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III. The Pursuit of Happiness

In his dreams, he didn't stutter. He still drove a police cruiser and sometimes it wound up in the pond, water rising until he couldn't breathe, but he could scream. He'd wake up, sweating in his bed, arms everywhere trying find the air above the water, but he didn't stutter. In his dreams he could say what he meant, and there was no one to stop him.

"Rosco!" If he didn't look out he was going to get himself poked in the chest by a burning cigar. Not on purpose, Boss was mean but not cruel. He just got to gesturing without regard for the fact that the tips of his fingers wielded a small flame. "You get out there and find that girl." Avoiding the cigar meant backing, stepping away from that chin-jutting scowl, must have looked like cowering, but it wasn't. It was just that sheriff's uniforms were flammable and his fair skin burned so easily. "People are starting to talk and worry, and I won't have kidnapping in my county. It's bad for business."

In his dreams he would have asked the man outright, would have stood up straight and tall and said, "Commissioner Hogg, do you have any information regarding the whereabouts of one Miranda Taylor?" Maybe pushed his hat back, then rested his hands on his hips to show how confident he was that all of his questions would be answered, what with the way his fingers were just inches from that gun in his holster.

But he didn't need perfect diction or a weapon at the ready. Boss's answer was right there in front of him, even as the squat little man backed him into a corner. His brother-in-law didn't approve of people getting hurt, not in any kind of a real way, not in Hazzard County. His reasons might not be the kind that should be held up to a magnifying glass – there were all kinds of impurities in there – but the outcome was the same. Boss would not support any harm coming to that girl. And the blood on that jacket of Bo Duke's – well Rosco couldn't shake the thought of that. It seemed to indicate a certain amount of seriousness behind the girl's disappearance.

"Boss," he dared, and that cigar bore down on his cotton uniform shirt again. "Jit!" He sucked in his gut, because the wall crowding against both of his shoulders didn't leave him any more room for retreat. "I don't think—Bo Duke, he—" When he slept, words tumbled right out of his mouth without tripping themselves up, but this wasn't a dream, and he wouldn't be waking up to find Miranda Taylor alive and well and minding her own business somewhere on the periphery of his county, while he played a never ending game of tag with the Duke boys in their souped up clunker car. "He don't know where she is, Boss. He didn't have nothing to do with her…"

"Dat, dat, dat, Rosco," and maybe that explained why the stutter came back when he rolled out of bed and into his day. The way he got interrupted before he could even get a thought out. At least the cigar swept away from him, same time as Boss did. "I know that. And you—you got the IQ of a clump of dirt. I already told you that Bo Duke wouldn't hurt nobody."

A clump of dirt, well that was new. A clump of dirt didn't know police work, wouldn't reason to ask—"Boss? Uh, if Bo Duke didn't hurt nobody, well, why're we holding him? Ijit!" Of course, a clump of dirt wouldn't find itself crowded back into a corner by the biggest short man Rosco had ever known. Popping brown eyes, and it was serious this time. Boss was going squeeze the life out of him right here in his own squad room, and just leave him a flattened hull of a man for his deputy to find when he came in at the end of his shift.

"Because, pea brain," and the meadow muffin never could be consistent in his insults. "The horse-rustling charges against him could be very useful. And there could turn out to be some more of them horse rustling charges coming against his cousin, too."

"Daisy? I don't think she'd go stealing no horses, Boss. Maybe she'd feed them itty lumps of sugar, 'cause they like that, but not, you know, rustling them or—"

"Dat!"

"Ijit!"

"Rosco! Not Daisy Duke, Luke Duke." But Boss was losing interest in him again. Turning away and heading off toward his office. "Just get out there and find that girl," was his dismissal.


	6. Light Sleep and Heavy Worry

_**Author's Note: **I know I said there wouldn't be too many of these, and there won't. This one's just to say that after posting this chapter it might be a couple of weeks before the next one goes up, as I'll be on vacation. Not to worry, it's all already written so it'll all get posted eventually, but I might not be able to update from the road._

_Since I needed to put in an author's note anyway, I might as well take this moment to thank everyone who is reading, and especially those who leave a review!_

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Chapter Six – Light Sleep and Heavy Worry

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 10: No person shall be compelled to pay costs except after conviction on final trial.**_

Luke came in after dark, a few hours after Daisy had gone off to bed at Jesse's insistence. Boy was smart, or maybe just lucky, to get home after she'd been in there long enough that her bile had somehow marinated down and mellowed into sleep. Slid in quietly, like maybe he hoped Jesse would have nodded off, too. But that was just plain foolishness on his nephew's part.

The kitchen light made him blink, shocked both of them with its brightness when Jesse turned it on. It wasn't intentional to startle Luke that way, it had more to do with being up-front and honest about how Jesse was fully aware that one of his kids was finally getting home.

"A little late, ain't it?" he observed.

"Yes, sir," and that right there was the difference between his boys. If Bo gave him a _yes, sir_ it was a tacit promise to at least try to behave himself in the future. When Luke felt the need to include a _sir_ in the process of agreeing, it was more like announcing how he wasn't ashamed of himself and he'd as soon as not just go out there and repeat the offending action all over again. Life went much smoother when Luke just said _yes_, and left it at that.

"Boots," he warned, before Luke came any further into the house. In fact, pulling off his shoes might not be enough to save him from the wrath of Daisy. The boy was filthy up to his knees, with splatterings of dirt here and there on his shirt, too. Even if he didn't track up the floor, they'd still be hearing about what a disaster he'd made of the laundry. "Luke," he said, and it was supposed to be the beginning of a longer conversation. But the boy was tired, had to be the way he stumbled out of his boots. "I expect you to eat that dinner that Daisy left warming in the oven. It ain't gonna do you no good to go starving yourself." Seemed like he'd already said those very words to one of his boys today.

Luke nodded, and he really must have been famished. Otherwise he would have argued against eating simply because Jesse had suggested it. Not that his oldest was contrary all the time, just when he was out of sorts. And nothing got under his skin more than having a big problem sitting in front of him and stinking to high heaven, just about taunting him with the way it refused to be solved.

"And then," Jesse added, because he wasn't done. He just got distracted by Luke being obedient, was all. "You need to get some sleep. I don't want you fussing," not that Luke ever fussed, exactly. Mostly he stood back and glared at the proceedings, whatever they might be at any given time. His silence was more damning than the average man's hollering ever got to be. "When I get you up early for chores. We's, all of us, going into town right after."

Brilliant blue eyes – used to be different when the boy was small, those eyes looking at him like they knew more than they should. Like every word Jesse said was being measured against a deeper knowledge of the truth that Luke had stored away somewhere in his head. Luke's look over his shoulder now from where he was after a pot holder in the drawer by the stove, well, he wasn't a little boy anymore. It was more about deciding how much effort it would take to argue, how great a chance he had of winning. Jesse stared him down, _this ain't negotiable_ in the way he stood and glared back. Got him a sigh and then Luke turned toward the drawer, and went about the process of getting his dinner onto the table. Eventually he sat and rubbed at his eyes, seeming confused about where to begin eating.

"You're tired," Jesse commented. Kept it neutral, just stating facts. Luke would argue until the last of his breath seeped out of his lungs if Jesse tried to take care of him or showed too much concern. But just saying what was obviously true, then fetching Luke a cup of milk, well, that kept peace in a house where his niece was sleeping.

Milk seemed to be the key; once Luke had that in front of him, plus the fork Jesse pulled out of the dish drainer, the boy seemed ready to eat. "Town?" Luke asked, which meant he was about as prepared to talk as he ever got.

"Gary Butler's lawyer-friend got into town today. They's gonna meet with us tomorrow." It didn't comfort him a lot to realize that none of them was on a first name basis with the men they were trusting Bo's future to. Not that he had reason to doubt the skills of Gary Butler or the man he had brought into the case, Alex-something-that-started-with-an-H, not a long name, just hard to remember to an old man who'd had nothing but light sleep and heavy worry for the past three days. He just didn't know them yet.

Luke just nodded, staring down at his plate. Concentrating on separating the beans from the peas and suchlike; not actually eating a lot.

"Good night, boy," Jesse said, because it certainly didn't take two of them to sort Luke's food by color and consistency.

"Jesse." He'd almost made it out of the room when he got called back. "We ain't never needed no lawyers before. Why are we spending money we ain't got on men we don't know?" _And don't trust_ were the words didn't get added. Luke didn't trust anyone, not until he'd known them for twenty years, at least. And even some men he'd known longer than that weren't so much trustworthy as predictable.

Jesse shrugged, because there was no answer that would satisfy Luke, not completely. "We ain't never dealt with a felony charge, neither. At least not since you boys got put on probation."

"Bo ain't committed no felony." Luke was more than tired. He was annoyed and angry and protective all rolled into a big ball of dangerous energy. A man best left to cool down, maybe, if there was any chance he would. (Not on your life, not as long as Bo was behind bars.)

"I ain't said he did, Luke," was a warning, because this boy could get himself wound up so tight that the only way to release tension was to snap it like a coil spring on a speeding car. The kind of thing that might could take out a tire or just leave the vehicle so unbalanced it'd flip. Either way, a near fatal kind of experience. "But you know, good as me, that a conviction would send him away." No need to elaborate about where. "Now I know you want him out bad as any of us. And I'm sure you ain't got no objections to trying everything in our power that could help him. Even," and the look he gave his nephew was all seriousness, because Luke had no sense of humor where Bo and prison were concerned. "If it's legal."

As expected, Luke didn't laugh or even relax the hunching of his taut shoulders. Instead he nodded, more at the food on his plate than Jesse, and sighed.

Had it been Bo there in the dim light of the kitchen, anxious, bone-tired, frustrated and upset, Jesse would have sat close, put an arm around his back, and shared the boy's pain. Luke – no one but Bo should ever get real close to Luke when he looked like this. Strange that Jesse had raised this child without ever learning how to lure him away from his dark ruminations. But Bo knew, instinctively (because there was no way his youngest had ever put any deep thought into it), how to handle Luke's worst moments.

"You didn't have no luck at all?" It seemed like compromise, maybe. Acknowledgement that Luke had to go through his own fool rituals in the name of getting Bo free.

"Nope," Luke said, shutting down further discussion. No one could say Jesse hadn't tried.

"Get some sleep, son," was about the best he could do for a stubborn nephew that wouldn't let his old uncle comfort him. "Morning'll be here soon enough." _And things usually look better then_, he didn't add, because Luke only would have denied the notion anyway.

And maybe the boy would even have been right about that. As far as Jesse could guess Luke slept through the night; in any case he stayed in his bedroom until chore time. Gray, drizzling day that made chores wet and silent, made him miss how Bo's hair would droop in the rain, giving him all the charm of a wet dog.

Even the trip to town was unremarkable, with Luke in the General and Jesse and Daisy in the pickup. Dang easy to keep up with his older nephew, who drove a perfectly legal fifty-five and didn't jump a single creekbed. Downright boring.

Alex Haddad, however, was something else entirely.

"The evidence is circumstantial," he said and his voice rattled through the room like a fast moving freight train. "But that doesn't mean they can't use it, only that I can point out that it's circumstantial, arright?"

Daisy was following with rapt attention, but she'd always been a good student. Both boys used to come home complaining that schoolwork didn't make sense and they weren't going to use any of it in their real lives anyway, but his girl, she'd never concerned herself with whether an assignment held meaning for her ot not. She'd worked out every equation, even if trigonometry had no place in farming or waitressing or looking after the needs of boy cousins that had never fully grown up.

"What we need, what would be best, is if we could find someone else with motive to hurt this Miranda girl, arright? Could be someone that didn't like her or didn't like Bo or both. All we need is to suggest someone else would have motive, so think about who that could be, arright?"

Luke was in the corner, arms folded across his chest, just smirking. Might be better if he was levelling a Luke Duke glare at this Haddad guy, would mean he thought there was something worth taking seriously in the man. But he wasn't, he was looking at that close-cut curly hair and the tanned face underneath, and finding it funny. City slicker, practically a Yankee, dark skinned in October, and there was no way Luke could give any respect to a man who got his tan out of a bottle. Loose cotton shirt unbuttoned down to places that were dang nearly indecent for a man with a desk job. His pants weren't pressed, and on his feet were what looked like some kind of store-bought moccasins, no socks. Such a ridiculous getup that Luke couldn't even get annoyed by him, and this was the man they were counting on to save Bo.

"Well," his nephew contributed, smug tone of voice that Jesse ought to swat him for, except he had more manners than that. Children got punished behind closed doors, even if they were too big to be considered children anymore. "Shoot. Ain't nobody we know got any motive to hurt Miranda. Ain't nobody knows her well enough to want to do nothing to her."

"Arright," and that just went to show that that annoying mannerism could just as easily start one of Haddad's sentences as end them. "How about Bo, is there anyone would want to see Bo sent off to jail?"

Even Daisy laughed at that one, and Luke's head tipped back the way it did when laughter was substituting for violence. Laughed exactly that hard before hitting Ernie Ledbetter over some girl. Broke the other boy's nose and they'd had to deal with threats of lawsuits until Luke apologized and set to helping the rest of the Ledbetter family with their planting while Ernie recuperated.

"Well," Jesse said, because someone had to answer the man. Unless his mama still dressed him in the morning, the man could be faulted for his absurd attire, but couldn't be blamed for not knowing how Hazzard worked. Heck, half of Hazzard didn't know how Hazzard worked. "That list would start with J.D. and end with Rosco."

Alex Haddad looked lost, and highly uncomfortable being that way. "Arright," he said, and maybe that sound was just a bookmark. A reminder that he had more to say later, as certain relevant facts revealed themselves.

"The County Commissioner and the Sheriff," Gary Butler supplied, and those might have been his first words since he'd introduced all the parties. Seemed like they were trusting Bo's defense to one mute man and another that didn't know when to stop talking.

"Arright, well that's not good," was Haddad's summation, and Luke burst out with another laugh. "Not good, not good. You boys got any other charges, besides the moonshining?" Because of course they'd had to lay it all out up front, how much Bo had to lose, even if the kidnapping charges didn't stick and it all came down to missing horses.

"What day of the week is it?" Luke was such a funny guy, and Daisy laughed in support of that, but Jesse reckoned the boy had been disrespectful enough for one day. This lawyer here, he might not be a real likable fellow, but he knew more than any of the rest of them in the room did about successfully defending a man against serious charges.

"What Luke there means is, they get charged with all kinds of things. But," because the man was looking like he'd stepped in a cow pie without ever having known he was walking through a meadow to begin with, "they ain't never been convicted, because they's always innocent."

"We Dukes got an ongoing feud with the local law," Daisy supplied helpfully. "It's been going on forever. Since my Uncle Jesse was a boy." Well, it was good to know that it had been forever since he was young. Seemed like just yesterday to him, at least most of the time. But all these whippersnappers in this room, they wouldn't understand that.

"Arright," Haddad agreed (or didn't, none of them had a clue whether the word meant good things or bad, simply that it was overused), "is there anyone besides the law that would want to hurt Miranda or Bo?"

"Ain't nobody would want to hurt Bo," Daisy said, and he was starting to think his girl kind of liked the new guy in town. Wouldn't have been the first time she got interested in a stranger; he was coming to think she was tired of Hazzard boys. But Jesse had no intentions of letting her get serious about this guy. Because there was no way he could let her bring him home to dinner; he couldn't sit through a whole meal of _arright_ and Luke would—

Luke was staring off at some fixed point in space that only he could see, eyes all but glowing. Like he could feel his uncle watching him (or maybe just because whatever thought he was having had just fully formed itself) Luke turned to him, dangerously blue eyes pinning him to the spot.

"Uncle Jesse," he said, and it was asking for permission. _Can I be excused? I'm full, couldn't eat another bite, and besides, I have a new theory that I need to chase down._

Maybe it was the apparent hopelessness of the two lawyers in front of them, maybe it was the fact that Luke had gotten them out of more jams than he could even remember getting into (maybe it was those eyes, his own mother's eyes that skipped a generation straight to Luke) but there was no point in pretense and blustering. He was going to let Luke go.

"Uh, excuse us just for a minute," he said, because he wasn't going to stop Luke, but he was going to put some rational thoughts into the boy's head before he went off to do Lord knew what.

Out on the marble stairs of the fancy stoop in front of Gary Butler's office, under the archway and out of the drip, he said, "Bo sure is going to miss you if'n you don't come see him with us." Didn't know why he said it – no point in making the boy feel guilty when his mind was already made up – except that it was true.

Luke shook that thought right out of his head before it could get past his eardrums and anywhere near his mind. "Uncle Jesse, all our time is gonna be spent introducing him to that – lawyer," funny how it sounded like an epithet, "in there. I ain't gonna get no time with him anyways."

"He'll still miss you." It was still true. And maybe Jesse just wanted Luke to admit he missed Bo, too, but that was a foolish old man's thought. Luke's mouth didn't know how to say that kind of thing; his brain might not even properly know how to think it.

"Tell him I'll be there tomorrow – unless I can clear him today."

"You really got something that can do that?" It wasn't like things hadn't ever moved that fast in the past, but when it did it was usually because the charges were something as silly as stepping on a crack, which Rosco saw as a personal attack on his mother's back.

"I don't know." Which was the truth, but not all of it. Luke's eyes didn't ever glow like that unless he really thought he had figured out something important. "But we ain't never gonna find out unless I get going."

The boy had a point, very valid. Seemed like he might be onto something, if only Jesse could bring himself to let him go. So he sighed; he'd already made this decision and he was going to stick to it. "Luke," he said, because it was an uncle's prerogative to remind the youngsters in his care that they weren't immortal. "It ain't gonna do Bo no good if'n you don't eat and don't get good rest. I expect you home before dark tonight."

It earned him an impatient glare, but Luke nodded before jumping off the steps and jogging out into the fine drizzle toward the General.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 11: The writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended.

It would be easier, in more ways than he could really count, if Luke were here. His cousin wouldn't have to say anything, just stand in the corner with his arms folded across his chest, and make faces. A glare, a downward curl at the corner of his lip, and it would announce to Bo that the man in front of him was annoying, but no threat. If the curl went up, the man was a buffoon and still no threat. That flat-line mouth Luke got, lower lip pressing hard against the upper, showing the world just how very closed the man's mouth was and not likely to open any time soon, that was the one that meant Luke figured the man couldn't be trusted. Kind of an old-time moonshiner's code between the Duke boys, reflecting a youth where Bo smiled to disarm the revenuer while Luke looked for weaknesses to exploit. Bo wasn't in the habit of figuring out the motives in whoever he was dealing with, he was better at decking the fool that revealed a nasty underbelly in an overt way.

This new lawyer's underbelly wasn't nasty, he didn't think. Slick, maybe, and slippery. The kind of thing that kept him moving fast in whatever direction he needed to, but for all that snake-like quality, he lacked fangs.

"Arright?" he asked, and Bo had no idea what the answer was supposed to be. No, probably, simply because nothing was all right. He'd been stuck right here for days on end, worrying about Miranda, and Jesse's vague description of Luke's absence made perfectly clear that the whereabouts of his cousin were something to be concerned about, too.

He nodded in response to whatever his lawyer (and how much was this little twerp of a fast-talker costing Jesse anyway? That was another one of those details that didn't make it from one side of the jail cell bars to the other) had said, and that seemed to be enough of an answer. Apparently Bo was arright, and the man could chatter away some more.

Daisy was just about holding herself up by the grip she had on the bars between them. Looking at the new guy like arright was the equivalent of gold, and she was collecting it, one coin at a time. There was no way to judge from her demeanor how he ought to feel about this lawyer.

His uncle, though, was building up to what could amount to a decent head of steam, and a lecture. _Pay attention, Bo. There's likely to be a test somewhere near the end of this thing, and you're going to have to pass it._ Right. He shouldn't worry about whether the man was trustworthy or not, he was the best defense Bo was likely to get, and unless he fully cooperated, all that money Jesse was spending wouldn't be worth a pitcher of spit.

So he did his best to focus, to concentrate on the words coming out of the man's mouth. But after long, passive days in jail, his brain was turning to mush. He had no more ideas about what could have happened to Miranda or the horses than he ever had.

He'd be lucky, assuming he ever got out of here (and what kind of a way was that to think? Of course he'd get out, there was no way Luke would let him go to prison) if all his muscles hadn't atrophied and he could remember how to drive.

He listened to the rollercoaster cadence of his new lawyer's nattering, tried to answer whatever questions were put to him. But his heart was elsewhere; out there and free with Luke, searching over the Hazzard countryside, smelling fresh air, hearing birds, tasting mountain stream water.

"Arright?"

No. He was not arright.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 12: All men have the natural and inalienable right to worship God, each according to the dictates of his own conscience, and no human authority should, in any case, control or interfere with such right of conscience.

Each Sunday, barring harvest, communicable illness, or false arrest at the hands of one Rosco P. Coltrane, Luke went to church. Learned a thing or two, got reminded about where he wasn't exactly minding his raising, felt guilty and got absolved almost every week.

The other six days were spent riding shotgun with Bo Duke, at least when he didn't find himself on the outside of the car, riding on the roof or hood. Trees, they had every intention of plucking him and Bo right off the road, and if they couldn't do it, the ditches had some serious designs on that orange car. Bo's gleeful grin knew no dangers, never considered gravity or velocity, and had no real concept of irresistible forces and immovable objects. Which left all the worrying to Luke.

And with all that considering he had to do, about forward momentum, trajectory, mass and exactly how hard a boulder would be and how soft the General's skin really was – with all the times he'd been shot at and all the Dukes he'd seen buried, he'd never thought real hard about meeting his maker.

But the feeling was right there on the back of his neck where those short hairs were raising up. Tiptoeing around this half-decayed old horse farm, where rich kids from Atlanta used to come for a summer of country living. Many of the structures had caved in of their own weight in the last quarter century, but the ones that stayed standing teemed with hidden crevices and gapped boards to dark spaces where all manner of danger could be lurking. Oaks, alive with dripping Spanish moss, gusting with each breeze in the lightly falling rain, and everything around him was in motion.

Couldn't have been much past noon or his gut would have told him so. He had no plans to eat, but that didn't mean his stomach couldn't tell the time. Midday, and gloomy enough to be twilight. Didn't help that it was fall, that dead and dying things rattled at this time of year, making him want to look in all directions at once.

But he knew how to handle himself in situations like this, could make the dim light and crackling leaves work in his favor. Over there was the remains of what must have been a storage shed; too small for livestock, too big for an outhouse. It was one standing building amongst a few others, and would make as good a place as any to start. He got his back flat against the north side, smelled of moss and fermenting leaves. Rain in his eyes and face as he made his way along the splintering boards, quiet splashing sounds and a nicker as he reached his left hand around the corner, then turned his face to look and—

His last thought, around the pain blossoming through his head, was that he must have been on the right track.


	7. Sharp Edges and Hard Surfaces

_**Author's Note: **Let's see now, where was I? Oh, right, Chapter Seven._

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Chapter Seven – Sharp E**dges and Hard Surfaces, Dark Corners and Explosive Weapons**

**Interlude 2: Hippocratic Oath**

_**I. I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients and never do harm to anyone.**_

It was Cooter that found him, soaked to the bone and covered in red clay mud, walking on the side of Rosebud Road. Waving the tow truck down with one hand, rubbing at the back of his head with the other. The worst, Cooter had reported, was that after he got into the truck, stumbling and clumsy, he shivered. Luke Duke, who wouldn't admit to feeling a chill while shirtless and wearing only shorts in the middle of an ice storm, had shaken like a wet puppy. Involuntarily, of course.

"Would've taken him to Doc—" Cooter had said.

"Don't need Doc," Luke had answered, even if talking had started him off into an uncontrolled cough.

"—Except for that," Cooter finished. "And I woulda brought him straight home," he went on to explain, even if Jesse was only half listening, as he stripped Luke's shirt off.

"Get yourself next to the fire, boy," came the old man's grumble as he shoved Luke into the living room, leaving Daisy behind in the kitchen to hear out Cooter's guilty confession.

"But he made me take him back for the General," Cooter finished. "Dang fool wanted to drive him, too, but I wouldn't let him. Hooked the General up to my wrecker instead, 'cause Lukas there wasn't in no condition to drive nothing."

Luke's rebuttal to that statement, such as it was, came in the form of a cough echoing back from the living room. Followed by Uncle Jesse suggesting a warm bath and then the kind of hacking that sounded like it must be leaving permanent scars on Luke's lungs.

"Back to the General?" Daisy asked. Someone had to entertain the company and maybe even thank them for their efforts in dragging home a wet and filthy family member. But her uncle was shoving Luke off toward the bathroom, for cleaning and lecturing, no doubt, so the social graces fell to Daisy. As always. Seemed like these things went better back when there were more Duke women-folk around to tend to such needs. Two would be enough: one to fetch the lemonade and another to tsk at the misfortunes of townsfolk.

Their friend shrugged. "He says he ain't sure how he wound up on Rosebud Road, exactly. Him and the General was up at the old Hastings Horse Camp up there on Trestle Road." Cooter took the seat she offered him, thanking her with a nod for the beer she dug out of the back of the refrigerator. She was going to have to get the whole story out of him relatively quickly, since they didn't have but the one can in the whole house. Unless he'd let her substitute coffee, but it was a little late in the day for that. "He didn't exactly confess to getting hit over the head, but I figure that's what happened. Mostly he just wanted to get back to the camp." Cooter took a big swig from the can, then grimaced. Served him right for guzzling store-brand beer. Not that it was any worse than Boar's Nest swill.

Daisy standing next to him wasn't hurrying Cooter along any, and for all the noise coming from the bathroom, it didn't seem like Jesse needed any help. Mostly it was coughing, not arguing, going on in there. "Good thing the General was still there," she said, pulling out a chair and taking a seat. "Best make that last," she added. Being direct was more Jesse's style, but she reckoned straighforwardness was best in this situation. "We ain't got but the one."

Turned out to be a mistake. "Sorry Daisy," Cooter answer. "You want to split it?"

No, it was probably half backwash by now. Should have known better than to go back on her raising. Aunt Lavinia would have managed to strike a balance between hospitality and honesty, probably. Maybe not, with the way Luke was telling Uncle Jesse he was fine, just fine. Lavinia wouldn't have tolerated that for a second, would have excused herself from Cooter's presence long enough to mother her older nephew.

"No, sugar," she sighed. What she really wanted was for Luke to have taken her with him this morning, or for him to stop coughing now, or just maybe for Bo never have to been arrested in the first place. "It was a good thing the General was still there when you took him back." Someone had to get this conversation back on track.

She got a knowing snicker for that comment. "He hid it." Of course he had. "Kept saying he must've been awful close to something and he needed to get back to work. You're just lucky he was moving slow as he was, or he might just have gotten out of the truck and gone back out there like he wanted."

Yeah, well, that was Luke. That was any Duke really. "Where exactly was he?" Because that old horse camp was huge and sprawling, and she certainly didn't have time to search the whole place in the day's last hour of light, but if she knew just where to look—

"Daisy," that was Uncle Jesse, and his voice wasn't calm. "Call Doc Appleby, tell him he needs to come out here."

Which effectively ended the conversation in the kitchen. In fact, it pretty much chased Cooter out of the house, once he'd swigged down the last of his beer, or course. Medicine wasn't exactly the mechanic's strong suit, and tolerating genuine illness didn't seem to be anything he really had in mind to do tonight.

Though it turned out that Jesse's primary concern was the welt on Luke's head, and the missing memories. There was no way of knowing how much time her cousin had lost to unconsciousness, but it had to have been long enough to move him out to where he'd woken up, on the edge of the overgrown old Mason meadow just north of Rosebud Road.

Of course, Doc's cure for a concussion, because he reckoned that was what it had to be, was to knock Luke out again. "Barbiturate," Appleby explained. "Should manage any pain, and keep him out overnight."

"Good," Jesse grumbled. "I'm too old to be fighting that boy." Because of course Luke didn't need to be in bed, he'd never needed to be in bed a day in his life. He only ever went to bed to make sure Bo slept and with Bo over in the jail—

"That cough," the old Doc shook his head. "I ain't sure about it. He musta already been sick, but being out there in that rain all day didn't help him none."

Jesse challenged Doc Appleby with just his eyes. _You just try keeping that boy under control_. Of course, a doctor had various forms of knock-you-out-cold drugs at his disposal, so he actually stood half a chance against Duke stubbornness.

Seemed like all their lives, every cough any of the Duke cousins ever got carried with it the risk for pneumonia. And—

"Luke needs to rest. We don't want that cough getting any worse and leading to pneumonia." It was the kind of thing a girl could set her watch by, if she wore one. None of them, no matter what kind of nasty, ugly bronchitis or laryngitis they'd ever contracted, had ever come close to pneumonia. Hard to say whether it was one of those things that the previous generation worried too hard about, because they'd seen so much of it in their youth, or if there really was any chance that Luke could get that sick.

Antibiotics were left behind, along with strict instructions to make sure that Luke actually rested, and, of course, to call if the cough got worse. Which, with Luke, it would be hard to tell. For all that Bo made the most noise on any average day, a laughing or coughing Luke had enough volume behind it to make the walls shake.

By the time old Doc had been thanked and promised payment in chickens, either live or fried, whichever the man preferred (and either way it was going to come down to Daisy to do the hard work of preparing and delivering said chicken), the dingy light was threatening to leave the sky.

"Uncle Jesse." She had every intention of telling him how there was something up at the old Hastings Camp that she had to take a look at, right quick, before it got too dark. But there were already circles under the old man's eyes, and an exhausted drag to his steps, and then there was Luke's cough rising from the back of the house. "I'll take the first shift with him," was what wound up coming out of her mouth. Because, medicated or not, her oldest cousin would bear watching against "sleepwalking" and other wandering types of maladies. If he wasn't so clearly miserable and currently unconscious, she'd be yelling at Luke for pulling the whole family's attention away from Bo.

_**

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**_

II. I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts.

Luke was nothing better than a dang fool. Seemed like at some point the boy should have learned about sharp edges and hard surfaces, dark corners and explosive weapons, but he hadn't. If there was a danger, Luke zeroed on it, noted the exact location and its distance from him, calibrated his internal compass, and walked right into it.

Lavinia used to worry after that one, always claimed he bore more watching than Jesse reckoned he did, even though Bo was more apt to come home with a bloody nose, swollen ankle or in need of stitches. _Bo_, she counseled, _is smart enough to cry when it hurts, and to realize that pain means it's time to stop doing whatever's causing it_.

Jesse dismissed her words as woman's worries. He always reckoned that slicing a finger instead of an onion was one thing; cooking could be interrupted long enough to tie it up with gauze. But out in the fields, a man was far enough from bandages that he had no choice but to just ignore the way corn stalks could cut up his hands. And the still, oh that was a whole different story. There was no walking away from a batch mid-cooking, whatever crazy injury might have occurred. Coming back out of the woods had to be a surgically pristine extraction on a good day; there could be no careless stumbling out, come blown vat or broken bone. Besides, all the medicine a man needed was right there. Drink a sip of 'shine, pour the rest on any open wound, and everything was good as new.

So Jesse just reckoned he had himself a good farmer and future moonshiner in Luke. And after Lavinia died, and some of the local widows vied for a chance to take her place with promises of taking good care of those poor children, he'd informed them all that Daisy was no problem to raise and Bo and Luke could take care of each other. He had lots of evidence to back his theory up, too. Stories of Luke piggy-backing a sore-footed Bo for the last mile of an overly ambitious hike, of unexplained black eyes and bruised knuckles that told their own tales of one cousin standing up for the other. It wasn't one-sided, either. Bo answered to needs that Luke never admitted having, like companionship and a reason to expect that maybe mornings wouldn't dawn gray and miserable.

Luke stirred in the bed next to where Jesse was pretending to read. Hard chair was keeping him awake, that and his ire, but his eyes were too tired to bother making out words.

"Hush, boy," he said, and it came out gentler than he felt about it all. Home before dark, he'd said, and without meaning to, Luke had obeyed that part. Seemed like something he should never have had to add, _come home in one piece. Don't make me worry about you when your cousin needs the whole of my attention._ And, maybe most importantly, _don't do anything that's going to keep you away from Bo for more than one day._ Because it would break Bo's already wounded heart.

"Cousin," Luke muttered, or something close to it. Could have been Jesse's tired ears making words out of gibberish.

"Hush," he repeated, but he was talking to a sleeping man.

It was always a mistake to take his eye of either one of his nephews, even if it was only to watch the other. If Luke was a full blown idiot for getting his skull knocked in the name of helping Bo, Jesse didn't have a lick of sense himself for imagining that the boy would do anything different.

"Get some rest, you dang fool."

_**

* * *

**_

III. All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.

There was a sick, dull ache that nagged him through his dreams, like a socket aching for its missing tooth. Not enough to let him form cohesive thoughts in the glue of his brain, just a pain to keep him from peace. The images before his eyes were of places he'd never been, frosty greens and browns he'd have to cross oceans to get to. Leaves with shapes that didn't make sense, hanging from twisted trees, dirt too worn out to grow anything but the hardiest weed. Acre upon acre of the wrong kind of nothing – some kind of strange scrub dotting flat expanse for as far as the eye could see, and only fog beyond that. He was, or had been, chasing after Bo in some childish game of tag, running over the lumpy soil, never catching up because Bo could fly. Not all the time, or at least he mostly stuck to the ground, but whenever Luke would get close, Bo would flutter away with the same kind of lopsided loping as when he ran. Never spoke, didn't call on Luke to follow. Just a flash of blonde fluff and wide, unlined eyes – which meant Bo couldn't be smiling, though Luke couldn't see all of his face to be sure – and gone. Frustrating as hell how light on his legs he was, when Luke could barely manage to lift his own feet out of dirt beneath, and couldn't muster enough voice to be heard above the nickering, rumbling hooves—

When the ache in his head came close enough to the surface to shake him out of those endless circles he was running and into consciousness, he was grateful. Took him a minute to know he was alert; the dark closed in on him just as tightly whether his eyes were open or closed. By the feel, though, he could tell he was home, in his own bed. Same sway to the mattress underneath him, wall still too close to allow an outstretched arm, smell of musty curtains that always permeated the room whenever they had to close the windows. It was the kind of thing him and Bo only did on the coldest days of the year, but his shadowed memories included a hot bath, Doc Appleby, windows getting shut, and (most memorably) a needle in his hip. Arms were made for injections; Luke had no idea why a practitioner of medicine had never figured that much out. Backsides were no place anything sharp should ever go.

The thing that made his room alien, still his but foreign, was that he was alone. He knew it as naturally as he knew that Hazzard Pond was wet – he didn't have to drive clean across the county to see the water, and he didn't have to wait for his eyes to adjust to the dark to know there was no one else in the room. Facts were facts.

Bo was gone, outside the reach of Luke's fingertips. For the first time since he'd come back from the service, Bo was beyond where Luke could get to him, had been that way for days. There was alone, like stalking off into the barn with a don't-you-even-think-of-following-me glare over his shoulder, and then there was _alone_. A thing too obscure to be defined, this kind of solitude; he hadn't ever contemplated what it would be like to have his own space any more than he'd imagined living in a mansion. There were some things Dukes weren't meant to do or to have, and privacy was one of them.

He hadn't been this alone all night, though. His eyes worked fine despite the ache behind them, had managed adjust to the low light and pick out the dim line of a hard-backed kitchen chair just feet from his bed. There was an overturned book on the seat; thick enough to be the bible. Probably Jesse had sat there until he figured Luke would manage to live through the night, then the old man had gone off to bed. Silly that he spent any time watching over Luke. Even through his coughing (and he shouldn't have thought about that, now his throat tickled – itched, more like) he could have announced his expectations of surviving the night. But Uncle Jesse hadn't been interested in a dang thing he'd wanted to say.

Right there was the proof of his hardy health, how he could sit up all by himself (despite the ache in his hip where no needle had ever belonged, and that downright pesky burning in his chest like a volcano just waiting to erupt into a timber-rattling cough) and even stand. One foot in front of the other and he was out the doorway and into the hall and—

"Luke." Jesse. "What are you doing up?" It would just figure that Bo would be the one in jail and Luke would wind up getting treated like an escaped convict.

He opened his mouth with every intention of saying things that would have brought out the whip ten years earlier. Something sarcastic, about how he was off to break Bo out of jail in the rain, and wearing nothing more than his shorts, too. Sucked in a mouthful of air to say it with, and his lungs balked, choked then coughed.

"Ya dang fool," Jesse hissed, but it failed to have the kind of righteous ire the man usually mustered in these situations. Sounded as tired as his uncle looked, as defeated as Luke felt, knowing how close he'd come to answers. (Had to have been close. A man didn't get hit over the head for things he _wasn't_ about to stumble onto.) "Get back into bed."

He probably could have spoken by then; the coughing had subsided to manageable through sheer force of will and a desire to keep quiet enough to prevent Daisy from waking up to make it a threesome standing in the cramped hallway and arguing how Luke probably needed another shot in his hip, since the first one hadn't done a good enough job of keeping him down. He used a hand gesture instead, just to be safe, maybe to keep himself from commenting on how he didn't need his uncle's help in the bathroom, which was where he was headed. He reckoned he'd already been punished once for his inappropriate thoughts, before they could even become words, and his chest was a little too raw for him to want to take a chance on more retribution.

By the time he got back to his room, the light was on inside, and Jesse was deep in contemplation of the pages of his bible.

"You ain't got to sit with me." Maybe he should have been nicer about that, something to do with thanking the man for wanting to.

Jesse's eyes rolled up from the small print in from of him, interesting how those glasses made him look like a stern schoolteacher, informing Luke with just a glance that he should just sit down and be quiet now. "Apparently," cold sound of steel in Jesse's voice, "I do. Since you can't seem to remember what's important."

It occurred to Luke to remind his uncle that he'd lived up to his end of the bargain by getting in before dark. Oh, it might not have been through his own efforts, exactly, but he'd obeyed the rule that was laid down. (And then he spared a thought, just one because he needed his wits about him, to wondering exactly what had been in that shot the Doc sunk into his hip. Because it wasn't exactly wise to keep having an urge to sass Jesse Duke.)

He raised his hand instead, _stay if you want_ in the gesture, and tried not to think about why he wasn't going to fight real hard to be alone right now.

"What was you thinking, Luke?" Well, mostly he'd been thinking about how there were limited places in Hazzard where horses could be hidden, and then he was quietly hoping the horses were still in Hazzard. And once he narrowed down what he thought might have been the only good place to hide horses (which would only bear fruit if the horse thieves were smart enough to pick a _good_ place to keep their ill-gotten goods), he started hoping that maybe if he staked the place out he'd see someone or something useful, spot some evidence that proved Bo wasn't behind it all. Beyond that, he'd tried not to think (tried, but couldn't stop himself) that maybe whatever he found with regard to the missing horses would lead him towards the missing girl and… then he'd stopped thinking all together, what with the unconsciousness that had consumed him.

When he woke up in the drainage ditch alongside Rosebud Road, he'd thought it was nice that his attacker hadn't wanted him drowned, because they could have put him in the gathering runoff there face first. That they'd mostly left him to slowly freeze in the chilly water was a mercy, really. His next coherent thought, after the recognition that he needed to get himself out of the ditch and back onto his feet, was how close he must have been, and how badly he needed to get back to the old Hastings Camp. Because it made perfect sense – he'd been dumped several miles away, so that the horses he'd heard in his last seconds of consciousness could be moved. He needed to catch the movers in the act before all the evidence left the county.

And his mind had clamped down on that last thought, allowing no others in, even after Cooter happened by and stopped to pick him up. _No, I don't want to go to home to Jesse_, he'd explained. _I need to go to the Hastings Horse Farm_. Cooter showed every sign of ignoring the perfect logic behind the request, and Luke was just about ready to get back out of the wrecker and walk where he wanted to go (since Cooter insisted on driving in the wrong direction) until one last brilliant thought came into his brain. _I need to get the General,_ he'd persisted. That was the key, right there. Cooter would let him rescue the car.

And when they got back to Luke's desired destination, there hadn't been any point in looking around for anything. The place was clearly abandoned in a doors-thrown-wide sort of an obvious way.

What Luke wanted had been there, but now it was gone. After that, he'd stopped bothering to think. Cooter hooked the General up to the wrecker and brought him home. Good thing he'd turned off his brain by then, or he might have had some choice words for Doc about where that needle got stuck.

Jesse was still waiting for an answer, just about tapping his foot in anticipation of the brilliant words that were about to be imparted.

Luke's breath was carefully shallow as he settled on his bed, looking for a comfortable way to lie down. Since the coughing had settled back down, his chest didn't hurt too much anymore. The pain in his head was a little more serious, but he reckoned a few more hours of sleep would fix that. And Jesse would see to it that he stayed prone at least that long.

"I guess I was just thinking about getting Bo out of jail," he said, like it was an admission of guilt. That was what Jesse wanted, a penitent boy.

The old man shook his head. "He don't want you getting yourself killed for him." Then a sigh, one that indicated Luke was beyond understanding the wisdom of an old man. Too sick, or too beaten up, or maybe just too big a fool to begin with. "Go to sleep, Luke."


	8. Overturned Stones and Rattlesnakes

**Chapter Eight – Overturned Stones and Rattlesnakes**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights Paragraph 13: No inhabitant of this State shall be molested in person or property, or prohibited from holding any public office, or trust, on account of his religious opinions; but the right of liberty of conscience shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, or justify practices inconsistent with the peace and safety of the State.**_

It smelled like a wet dog, and as far as he knew, Flash wasn't even in the building. Then again, she probably was; Hazzard had to be the only county whose law enforcement postponed criminal investigations due to rain, as if they were nothing more important than baseball games. As if there weren't prisoners that had been taken in this little game, and held in dank basements away from their families.

It was a stupid realization to come to, locked away, alone in a decrepit cell, about how he'd never loved Miranda. He cared about her plenty, like he cared about any girl he'd ever dated. He wished her well and hoped she was safe somewhere. He might even hope she was happy, if only she'd show up long enough to get him out of this jam. But he didn't love her.

Oh, he'd wanted to love her, had worked hard at it and even convinced himself he'd succeeded, or gotten close enough that the rest would come in time. Because on those moonshine making nights, when Jesse would dig out the medicinal mason jar to stave off the chill, his uncle would talk about love. Somewhere in those years when Luke was on the other side of the world and Jesse reckoned it was time Bo learned the family trade, the old man would get lost in rambling tales about his years with Lavinia. To hear his uncle tell it, those years hadn't all been smooth, some of them had burned on the way down and left lumps in his throat that still had to get swallowed from time to time. But the kind of love they shared in those later days wasn't that first thing they'd felt, hiding, courting behind the shaded veil of Spanish moss, in spring days made of picnic baskets and sweet kisses.

Jesse swore that love was constructed out of staying together through those years of locust-decimated crops and wildfires threatening everything they owned. It was in spelling each other through long nights of comforting miserable children whose mamas and daddies had left them behind, and changing diapers of babies they'd never given birth to. _Don't_, he'd warned the teenaged Bo, whose libido was growing almost as fast as his legs were, _go thinking you know what love is until you survive your first tragedy_.

And right here, sitting on the creaking old cot with dirty and worn sheets, looking out at the gray skies through a window in the next cell over, Bo realized it. This was his and Miranda's first tragedy, and their relationship wouldn't survive it. It wasn't love.

Love was the thing that sent his family scrambling to the corners of the county trying to get him released from jail. Couldn't have been anything less than love that made Jesse fork over money (but how much? No one would tell him) to a lawyer instead of relying on his own skills in representing Bo. And, he kept telling himself – enough times so that he would believe it – it must have been love that kept Luke away from him. Likely had him combing the countryside looking for Miranda or Rainbow or Henry, or any clue that would lead him to figuring out how to prove Bo's innocence.

And, it was love that kept nattering in the back of his brain about how Luke was skirting the dangerous edges of something bigger than their usual fare of Boss schemes and fumbling out-of-towners. Whoever was behind this wasn't afraid of blood, and that made them a whole different breed of dangerous. And sure, Luke had fought in a war, but he hadn't been out in that jungle alone. Here in Hazzard, where the sheriff was made of sugar and wouldn't even go out into the rain for fear of melting down into a sticky mess, Luke was out there turning over rocks just to see what would crawl out from underneath.

Love was what made his heart pound and his throat hurt at the thought of what could happen if there turned out to be a rattlesnake under one of those stones Luke looked under.

_**

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**_

Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 14: No money shall ever be taken from the public Treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religionists, or of any sectarian institution.

All the mercies in his life were small just now, breadcrumbs to a starving man, but he was in no position to complain. He wasn't Job; though he had lost much of his family, he wasn't bereft. He had no boils, no real illness to speak of, just that ongoing pain in his toe. It was neither the Lord nor Satan that was putting him through these trials, it was just his nephews testing his patience like they always had.

Luke, at least, fell into genuine sleep after that one visit to consciousness. He'd been fitful before that, almost like he was fighting against the medication that was meant to make him sleep. It was a waste of money to doctor a boy that would use every bit of his energy to undo the intended positive effects of medicine. His supposedly smart one, who was only intelligent enough to be crafty. Would have helped if Luke would use his intellect toward better outcomes than just sneaking out of his room when a man decided to rest his old bones in the living room chair instead of that stiff, wooden one Daisy'd dragged into the boys' bedroom. A cup of coffee, a soft seat, and maybe he'd thought that turning off the bedside light would help Luke settle down, but of course not. At least the drugs coursing through his system had slowed his movements, made him clumsy enough that he startled Jesse up from where he'd been resting his eyes. Not fast enough; by the time he got to Luke, the fool was already out in the hallway. Making excuses about how he needed to use the bathroom, but the man who raised him knew better, recognized that while Luke's first destination might have been down the hall, the boy wouldn't rest until he was out of the house.

Then again, that little night stumble seemed to settle Luke's muscles, if not his brain, so that when he got back to bed he slept instead of merely being unconscious. He was still dead to the world come sunrise, when Jesse had left Daisy in charge of watching him. Still hadn't stirred after chore time, and it seemed like maybe the fool had finally figured out that he needed rest.

"If he ain't up on his own by ten," was the beginning of the instructions he gave Daisy. "You get him up and bring him to town. We'll all go in to see Bo at eleven." No more of that one-by-one visitation that broke Bo's heart and gave Luke fool notions that it was a good idea to slip off by himself without letting anyone know where he'd gone. "And don't let him go nowheres else."

Maybe it wasn't fair to leave Daisy in charge of him. She was going to have a struggle on her hands, but it would be no worse a struggle than Jesse himself would have had. Besides, Luke would be more likely mind to his mothering cousin than his elderly uncle anyway. Boy had no respect for authority (which was fine when that authority was Boss Hogg, but problematic when it was anyone else) but he loved both of his cousins. A few tears from Daisy and Luke would manage to get himself dressed in his Sunday best and be on his top behavior to boot.

Besides, Jesse had overwhelming considerations that couldn't be mitigated by small mercies. Like paying the legal fees for the defense of his youngest charge with only half a harvested crop and no negotiated buyer for it, and then there was a mortgage payment that was due by three o'clock on the fifteenth regardless of crops or missing girls. Could be that this was one of J.D.'s more elaborate schemes, just another attempt to get the Dukes out of Hazzard. Could have been that simple, but Jesse couldn't take that chance, not with Rosco acting genuinely scared. It was one thing for Enos to walk the countryside in tiny steps with giant eyes, peering around each corner like he expected to find a gun toting man or a beautiful girl on the other side. Didn't matter to Enos, he was scared of both. But Rosco – when he was part of a plot, he strutted and preened and talked gibberish. When he was frightened, he got quiet and serious. At no time had Rosco claimed that investigating the Taylor girl's disappearance would have killed ten ordinary sheriffs. That wasn't a good sign, it meant Rosco really _was_ serious this time.

And it was one thing to give over a few chickens to the Doc. That-there was a man who understood that eating was more important than having a house with more rooms than people, or a fancy gold chain around his neck. These two lawyers, they weren't Hazzard men. Might be the best thing for Bo that they weren't, but Jesse was going to have to figure out a way to convince them that the pittance of savings left over from the boys' NASCAR days, plus half a crop of corn, was a reasonable reward for Bo's freedom.

_**

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**_

Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 15: No law shall ever be passed to curtail, or restrain the liberty of speech, or of the press; any person may speak, write and publish his sentiments, on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty.

For all the scars Luke and Bo must bear on their hind ends (at least to hear them tell it—Jesse did use a whip, but it was hard to imagine him ever doing serious harm to any of the children he'd raised and loved despite the fact that they weren't technically his), Daisy had never received anything more harsh than a stern look and a verbal reprimand. But she might just be fixing to get her first-ever whipping right now.

"No," she said, and it was a formality, but Luke didn't know that yet. Might just go to prove that he really wasn't fit for what he was proposing. "Luke! Bo needs to see you today." Even if Uncle Jesse hadn't reinforced that with her, she knew it to be true. Bo was – for such a big guy, he seemed to be diminishing in the jail, his volume getting ever quieter each day, and soon enough the life of the Dukes' party was likely to go silent.

Luke's head was shaking, his face distorting into that look he used to save for Rosco (and Bo) but had started to unleash on everyone lately – the one that called her an idiot even if his mouth was closed tight against uttering a sound. Hands on his hips until he pushed them off, and he was being patient. He could storm past her now (probably would in a minute), just walk away from the whole argument. He was upright and moving around just fine, if a little pale and clammy. Voice raw, but no coughing, and as usual, pneumonia was an empty threat. The rain was gone; Luke was fully dressed and halfway clean and the only thing between him and where he wanted to be was Daisy, doing her damnedest to speak in the voice of Jesse. And failing.

"I'm coming with you, then," she threatened. "You can't go out there alone again! Didn't none of us know where you were, and it's just lucky that Cooter came along— Luke." She was going to lose, had been on the way to losing from the time her cousin woke up.

Luke had finally figured it out, too, that she was going to lose. He shook his head and dropped his hands down to his sides. It was its own kind surrender, an invitation that no one outside the family would recognize. If Daisy wanted to put her arms around him now, Luke would hug back. For all that he'd grown up a Duke, with Bo pretty much attached to his hip, Luke had never much figured out affection. But he'd take it when it was offered.

So she swatted him, hugged him, kissed his cheek and rested her head on his chest.

"I'll be fine," he told her and she didn't believe it for a second. "Besides, Bo needs you." She started to back out of his arms, to remind him that Bo needed both of them, but Luke kept her close. "I need you," he admitted, and it was no wonder he didn't let her get any distance away where she might have been able to see his face when he said that. "To go and see Bo. And tell him it'll be all right."

"And get whupped by Uncle Jesse," she reminded him.

Luke laughed, but it wasn't funny. Not really. "He won't whup you, girl." And Luke still hadn't let her go, must have something else to get off his chest. She waited silently, smelling the same laundry detergent she'd used all her life. Clean shirt on Luke's back, and she didn't mind if it came back to her dirty or torn, so long as Luke stayed in one piece. Of course, she had no intentions of telling him that. "Tell Bo I—tell him I'll see him soon. And that I, I'll get him out. And I—" _love him_, but Luke didn't quite have those words in his vocabulary, so—

"I'll tell him. But," she insisted, because it was important. It was the kind of thing Luke would pooh-pooh, but that was only because he was a fool. "You promise me you won't go getting yourself hurt no more. If you see anything – anything at all that looks like trouble – you'll get on the C.B. and call for help. You know that me, Uncle Jesse and Cooter will all be there quicker'n two shakes of a lamb's tail."

Finally Luke kissed her cheek, then let her go and headed for the door to face whatever danger was out there. Meanwhile Daisy steeled herself to face her own demons, in the form of one steaming mad uncle. She was halfway to town before she realized that Luke had listened to her talk, but he'd never agreed to the promise.


	9. Fumbling and Flea Powder

**Chapter Nine – Fumbling and Flea Powder**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 16: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrant shall issue except upon probable cause, supported by oath, or affirmation, particularly describing the place, or places, to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.**_

He stood about a fifty-fifty chance of getting himself hit over the head again, probably. It all depended on exactly how brazen (or stupid) Miranda's brother was. It really didn't take a genius to recognize that Luke's only starting point would be the place where he'd already gotten pretty well crowned by the man himself. If Benjamin had half a brain or any real taste for violence, he'd be waiting for Luke at the Hastings Horse Farm.

The violence of the man—well the jury was still out on that. Seemed kind of like impulsive hostility, not anything he could sustain after he thought about it. Because if Benjamin had genuinely wanted Luke gone, he'd had all the opportunity in the world. Well-wielded board aside, once Luke was out cold, it wouldn't have been hard for the man to make sure the Duke boy was in no position to come snooping around again. Simple to put him face first into the water at the bottom of the ditch he'd left Luke in, but he hadn't. In fact, it was a pretty safe bet that Taylor had left him by the side of the road, reckoning he'd be found and taken care of. That he was in the water at all just spoke of a man that was hasty, careless, already thinking ahead to his next move before finishing the task at hand. The kind of thing that spoke impetuosity and no real intent to harm, a man winging it without any clear plan.

Bobwhite discussions rang out over Luke's head as he walked the distance between one abandoned barn and another, looking for hoof prints or tire tracks. The ground was soft enough that there had to be evidence of where the horses had been hauled off to from here. If his head hadn't been hurting so badly, if Cooter hadn't been such a nag in his ear, he would have realized that there was no way to get horses through mud, whether you walked them or took them away in trailers, without leaving obvious tracks behind. If his brain hadn't been reeling with alternating images of an enraged Benjamin Taylor, swinging a two-by-six at him with a great deal of force, and Bo Duke, quiet and miserable in his jail cell, Luke might have done a couple of things differently. Now he'd lost close to twenty-four hours, and it was going to be that much harder, but at least he didn't have to worry about sneaking and hiding. If Benjamin Taylor was smart, he already knew Luke was here, because he had no place else to go.

Birdsong continued to twitter around him, and it was obvious that only one of the critters overhead was actually a bobwhite. The other was a mockingbird, having his way with the world, singing whatever song would get him an answer.

Aside from how crafty and clever Benjamin Taylor might be, there were still plenty of other questions. Exactly how deep was Boss Hogg in this scam, and what was Miranda's contribution. There was no body for Enos to find, of that Luke was sure. And it was awfully convenient how the sheriff's department had been lured over to Harper's Woods, two ridges and a river-swollen valley away from here, to do their investigating. But neither Boss Hogg nor Benjamin Taylor seemed interested in genuine blood, so what was on Bo's jacket couldn't be human. And a slaughtered cow or pig bled plenty, before it got eaten or frozen for another day. Shoot, could even be that Bo's jacket was covered in spaghetti sauce; it wasn't like Enos would know the difference.

Stupid mockingbird kept switching tunes, like it was marking time, pointing out that Luke had wandered these rambling fields for hours now and hadn't been through the half of the old camp yet. He glowered up at the oblivious creature that just kept on having its merry way, mocking what a fool the Duke boy was. Strolling around in plain sight, just about begging Benjamin Taylor to come take another crack at him, if only so he could have half a chance of proving that the girl wasn't missing at all, and that Bo had nothing to do with the horse rustling. It was the main reason he couldn't bring Daisy with him, the fact that he was just about gambling with his life. Banking on the accuracy of his analysis of Benjamin Taylor, that the man wasn't holding a loaded shotgun with intent to use it against him right now.

And that annoying bird just kept right on singing, behind Luke now, but loud and strong. Almost, but not quite, masking a scuffling noise. To Luke's right, but beyond that it couldn't be pinpointed, because it quit, right when he was getting a fix on it. Could have been a squirrel in the dead leaves, could have been, if the leaves had been dry enough to rustle, and if it had been a crunching sound. Wasn't, sounded more like shuffling or scraping, or brushing up against—

The nearest structure in the right direction was an old stable. Still solid-looking, no serious gaps between the boards. Exactly the kind of place that could conceal a man with a weapon, he reckoned, and a good place to put horses, too. Going toward it could get him killed. Or get him answers, and fifty-fifty was about the best odds he'd had all day.

He could sneak up on whatever might be in there, but that was a fool's game. Down at the core of his being, where honesty met stupidity head on without flinching, he fully expected to take a beating of one kind or another (because there was no way Benjamin Taylor had managed to drag an unconscious Luke into a car here at the old camp, then drag him back out onto the edge Rosebud Road, not without help). He reckoned it would hurt more presenting himself for the beating, but his primary goal was to stay conscious this time, at least long enough to learn something. It was the gamble of an idiot or a desperate man, a prayer that he wouldn't get his fool self killed.

He rounded the nearest corner of the old structure, up to the wide doors, and flung them open. He wasn't alone.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 17: There shall be within the State of Georgia neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, save as punishment for crime after legal conviction thereof.

A sheriff had loftier aspirations and vastly nobler missions than this. Apprehending suspects was his primary function, preferably after a high speed chase. In a car, not on foot, because running brought back his childhood tendency toward asthma. And if the cars were still, at least he could be saving his county from drunk parkers. At the very least he could be serving his commissioner and promoting the welfare of the county government, even if that meant he had to carry a concealed fire hydrant.

But no, he was babysitting a Duke. Sort of. From a distance, twelve steps up, in his own squad room, where his dog still needed flea powder, where he didn't have to watch a usually vivacious young man slowly disappear inside of himself. Besides his poor Velvet Ears was just itching something fierce; he could see it in her eyes. She'd never stoop to scratching herself (and besides, it didn't seem like her itty-bitty hind leg could make its way around her num-num filled belly just lately), which left her doomed to suffer in silence. Unless he could powder her soft little belly.

"Hi She'ff!" And once again, the powder managed to get everywhere but on Flash, when he jumped at the deputy's annoying greeting.

"Gijit, Enos!" he scolded, but when he was done grabbing the tipped can of flea powder and righting it, he looked up to see that same dipstick grin that never cowered away from his menacing demeanor. "Don't go scaring poor Flash like that! Can't you see she's trying to get some sleep after a long day of investigating?" Missing persons that insisted on remaining missing, and Rosco didn't like it one bit.

"Why, she ain't left the office, she'ff!" was the ninny's answer, and it was just a good thing Rosco was too busy trying to collect the flea powder back into the container or he'd tell that Enos a thing or two, why he'd—"Anyway, I done brought Bo's dinner back from the Busy Bee Cafe. You want me to take it to him?"

"Enos," he menaced, for no good reason. Or, for a very good reason, just one that had nothing to do with Enos. "Of course I want you to take it to him, you dipstick!" Because that was what deputies were for, feeding prisoners and just maybe staying the night to babysit them. They were not to go out there botching up crime scenes so badly that Rosco couldn't find the tiniest nibble of a lead, not a scuffed blade of grass of a scraped up twig to point him in the direction of a missing girl. Boss wanted her found, wanted Rosco to comb all of Harper's Woods on hands and knees if he had to.

"All right, She'ff," Enos answered, oblivious to the fact that he'd just been yelled at. Always made it less than satisfying to scream at that boy, the way he just kept on smiling as if in the middle of a discussion about what a pretty blue sky that was up there. At least he had the good sense to leave the room this time, down the stairs and off to feed the boy.

_Find that girl_ had been Boss's mantra for days, but he wouldn't let Rosco go back to the Miller farm and track hoof prints (which might have survived the rain, at least partly) and he wasn't allowed anywhere near that Benjamin Taylor, either.

"You ain't got no call to be questioning the victim," Boss had informed him.

But that Taylor fellow, he didn't look so innocent. He looked smug and surly and mean. At least until he realized he was getting looked at. Funny how his face changed then, to that same intense worry and grief as he'd shown that day he came bursting in to the courthouse announcing that his sister was missing, and all but pointing a finger at Bo Duke.

And Bo, there was a boy that looked – well not innocent. Not a single Duke had ever looked innocent from the time they were born. (The hairless, toothless and grinning infant Bo Duke had been cute though, even if he'd had those beady little eyes just sizing Rosco up, even back then.) But he was starting to look beaten, confused, just plain lonely. Wrong, the boy looked wrong without a smile on his face, without Luke Duke right there under his arm as a makeshift leaning post.

"Flash," he cajoled, because he'd done his best to collect the flea powder back into its can, but so much of it was still clinging to his desk, protecting wood against pests that would never think to bite it anyway. "Do you reckon you could open your itty bitty eyes for a minute, so Daddy can show you where he wants you to sit?" The twitch of a doggy brow was about all he got for his efforts. Poor girl was exhausted from trying to figure out what had happened to that Miranda Taylor, no doubt.

"She'ff," and if Enos burst loudly into a room where a man was talking to his dog one more time, Rosco wasn't going to be responsible for accidentally pulling his gun on the boy.

"Jit! Enos! What?"

"I done fed the prisoner, She'ff!" Simple task, shouldn't make a man so happy. Especially not when it meant going down into that basement and facing down a miserable Duke. "You want me to do anything else, She'ff?"

"Go home, Enos." Twelve hours a day was enough time to spend in close proximity to Enos Strate.

"You sure, She'ff? I could help you with your dog there," and the whippersnapper made a move towards Flash. "Nice doggy." Hand reaching out to pet her and the fool had an IQ smaller than his shoe size when it came to approaching a police dog.

"Enos!" he snapped. Stretching a hand toward Flash that way could lead to the boy bringing back a nub, bloody one at that, and Rosco wasn't in the mood for a twilight run to Tri-County with a deputy bleeding all over his cruiser just because the idiot boy had tried to pet a working dog. "You just go home now, you hear?" He'd said it loud enough that the words echoed back at him from the corners of the nearly empty room. But Enos never stopped smiling, just pulled his hand back and patted Rosco's tight shoulder.

"All right, She'ff. Good night, She'ff," and the grinning dipstick finally went over to get his coat from the back of his chair. "See you in the morning, She'ff." Made his way to the swinging doors, "Bright and early!" And he was gone.

Leaving Rosco with a snoozing dog in front of him, and a wide-awake boy downstairs. He couldn't swear to it, but he reckoned Bo Duke wasn't doing a lot of sleeping the last few nights. The boy was too pretty (or too young and healthy, maybe) to get circles under his eyes, but he hadn't exactly been energetic these past few days, either. And he hadn't looked right, sitting on that cot down there all alone. Too small, not the six-and-half foot, smiling menace to society that he normally was.

Rosco understood about how loneliness could shrink a man. Heck, he'd once stood a solid six feet himself, but now it seemed he spent the better part of the day stooping to see eye to eye with Boss. And Flash, well he had to just about crawl to get to her level. It was the kind of behavior he might never have gotten around to exhibiting if he and Lulu had grown up the same kind of close as those Duke cousins. If she'd challenged him to stand tall instead of scaring away all of his friends.

Enos must have been just about to his boarding house by now, and there was no one else around to see him take pity on Bo Duke. Just twelve steps down and the only thing he'd find at the bottom was a sad, lonely man. It crossed his mind that sitting alone down there for that long could drive a man to tears, and he would give up his badge before he'd deliberately walk into that kind of a mess. So—

"All right, Bo Duke," he announced himself, when he got halfway there. Ought to annoy the boy, make him stand up and ask what Rosco was going to frame him for this time. (And if only the sheriff could be sure that the boy had been framed, well maybe he could do something about it all. If he could just find the dang girl.)

"What, Rosco?" It was tired, not confrontational in the least. "Ain't your mama gonna wonder why you ain't home for dinner?"

Now, you see, that there was a low blow. Low and sneaky and—his mama had stopped bringing him dinner back when he got engaged to Sue Ann Bliss. Even if the marriage had turned out to be part of a scam and there hadn't been a woman in Rosco's life since, his mama hadn't ever gotten over it. _You're a big boy now_, she'd said, and just like that, he was on his own for lunch and dinner.

The Duke boy sighed, looking down at the floor like he'd find his patience lying there at his feet. Sitting on the cot and his dinner not even touched, didn't look like. "What do you want, Rosco?"

What did he want? Not to feel guilty, to know that the person locked up in a jail cell for days on end was a real criminal. Not to be uncomfortable in his own lockup, maybe. But those thoughts were heavy and he didn't want to think them anymore.

"I'll tell you what I want," he said, in his most commanding voice. "I want you to tell me where that Taylor girl is!"

Rolling eyes, and the boy was being tolerant of him. "I already told you, Rosco, I don't know."

Infuriating, just like a Duke. "Jit!" The boy was supposed to be enraged, not patient. "Tiddly-tuddly. I know what you told me," he sauntered across the room, closer to the nearest jail cell, where Bo still hadn't stood up from the cot. "And I also know you're a Duke. And you Dukes lie, you just lie all the time." Finally, Bo's face changed from the passive look it had worn for the better part of the last few days. Anger wasn't the boy's best look, but it beat out the moping countenance he'd been treating Rosco to every time he had to bring down a meal.

"Rosco," and Bo's head was shaking at the ridiculousness of it all. "Ain't never been a Duke that's lied to you, and you know it."

Lied, no. Misled maybe, bamboozled, tricked, sassed…

"Now you just listen here," he said, swaggering close to the cell. "You better start giving me some answers or I'll—I'll just cuff you and stuff you—" oops, wrong threat, Bo was already stuffed, it was just that Rosco was just so used to saying it. "Ijit! And then I'll just—you'll be under the jail is where you'll be and won't nobody be able to help you then!" There, that brought the Duke boy's hackles up, made him march right on up to the other side of the bars, squinting down hard.

"Rosco," he said, and his hands were in fists at his side. "I got a right to counsel if you're gonna go threatening me like this."

Wrong, wrong, wrong, see – it wasn't supposed to go this way. No counsel; he'd put a good deal of preparation into making sure it would be just him and the boy in here. By now Boss would be chin deep in Lulu's hog jowls, stuffing his little fat face until he was ready to pass right out for the night. And Enos ought to be safely tucked away, maybe heating a can of tomato soup over the camp stove that served as his kitchen.

"You don't scare me," he hollered. "You and your counsel. You done been counseled already today. By your Uncle Jesse," ooh, that was working. Just look at how Bo's eyebrows got all tightly knitted about that one. "And your cousin Daisy. Only one you ain't been counseled by is Luke." There it was, the boy was long past rational now. "Where's your big, tough cousin when you need him?" And Rosco was chest up to the cell now, the bars nudging at the brim of his hat, threatening to bring it down over his eyes.

Bo moved quickly then, arm snaking out from between the bars to catch the back of Rosco's neck and pull him up close to the bars.

"Ijit! Bo Duke, don't you go escaping now!" Rosco's arms were far out to his sides, pinned up against the bars and nowhere near the keys at his belt. "Don't you go…"

"Sorry, Rosco!" Bo chirped as he used his free hand to pull the sheriff's hat down all the way until the inside rim hooked under his chin, leaving him in stuffy blackness, not enough air to breathe. The weight of the keys disappeared from Rosco's belt, and then the heat of Bo's hand came away from the back of his neck. Made him stagger back against the nothing that was holding him up now. Both hands on his own hat and pulling it further down rather than lifting it up. Two stumbling steps and there was the chair they left down here for visiting, entangling itself with his leg. Trip, falter, tumble, and by the time he landed on his backside he could hear Bo Duke's retreating footsteps as he ran up the stairs and out of the jail.

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 18: The social status of the citizen shall never be the subject of legislation.

He could just hear Aunt Lavinia nagging at him from beyond the grave. Forever in his head, she was, keeping him from having half the fun he wanted to. Making sure he was relatively healthy and safe while warning him against foolish mistakes. She didn't always succeed, his aunt didn't, but that was mostly because she was only a memory, echoing back from his childhood.

He'd gotten to missing her a lot these past days. The way she'd take care of Jesse, making sure he didn't spend too much of the day in the hot sun, and that he got enough sleep, even if it had to be in the day because he made moonshine all night. She wouldn't have let Jesse get so old and tired looking as he'd been these past days. The voice of reason, she would have talked him out of spending money on not just one lawyer, but two.

Lavinia would have made sure Daisy didn't get to looking as harassed as she had today, in fact, if his aunt had lived, the girl wouldn't have been allowed to wear all that makeup. No way she'd ever work in the Boar's Nest, and not in those shorts for sure.

And Luke. There was no way in hell (Lavinia chastised him for even thinking that word, but it was true, no way in hell) she would have let him get away with not coming to visit the shut-ins today. Even if he was sick, like Daisy said, he would've been dragged in by his earlobe. Unless he was hospitalized, and both Jesse and Daisy swore he wasn't that bad off.

(Except he was, or he was about to be.)

Luke was sick, maybe, but he wasn't home. Bo could tell that in the way Daisy's eyes drooped to the left when she told him about how Doc had visited last night and prescribed bed rest. _Don't ask me if he's actually doing what he was told_, that descending glance begged him, so he didn't. It wasn't like he needed to anyway.

Lavinia would have told Luke that as much as he wanted to chase down whatever leads he had, he should go and see Bo first. That not everything was about being superhuman and saving the day, and sometimes it was better just to go and spend ten minutes with someone so that they could see you were okay.

(Luke was not okay.)

It was a mounting feeling throughout the day. At lunchtime, when most of his family had arrived to spend their pitiful half hour with him, bearing excuses for Luke's absence, he'd been angry. No, anger wasn't the right word, he hadn't managed to get all the way to angry since the day Rosco had cuffed and stuffed him in here (and he should have asked for a piece of coal to mark the passage of time with, because he wasn't sure whether it was four or five days anymore); he wasn't angry, he was hurt. That Luke couldn't take the time out of his busy day of saving Bo's neck, just to stop by and say hello.

When he was alone again, the annoyance fizzled like that sodium bicarbonate that Boss always guzzled after a particularly gluttonous meal. Silence with his thoughts about how Luke was sick and out there alone, looking for whatever would get Bo freed, and the guilt started to set in. Frustration that he couldn't pick up the slack where, clearly, Luke needed to leave off. His cousin never made it easy, wouldn't admit he was sick until his body just about gave up on him, all but collapsed in the heat of planting season. But then, when he had to, Luke would finally let Bo spell him long enough that he'd get some of the rest he needed.

Sick and single-minded, without anyone close enough to offer to shoulder some of the load, Luke was the very embodiment of a fool. No rest, not even long enough to come and sit on the other side of the jail's bars for a half hour.

(Luke was in trouble.)

Had a whole afternoon to imagine everything from his cousin passing out from fever, out in the middle of nowhere anyone would ever find him, to him trying to fight off whoever had hurt (maybe killed) Miranda, without the strength he needed to properly defend himself. Plenty of time between lunch and dinner to imagine the whole spectrum of things that could happen and—

(Luke needed his help.)

Maybe it was too many hours (days) of ruminating that kept him quiet when Enos came down with what smelled like a really unappealing dinner. Same old chipped beef as he'd been eating on jailhouse nights since the first time he spent the night here in 1977 or so. Coffee to drink, would keep him up all night, but the alternative was water and he never had grown to like a flavorless drink with his meals.

"Thanks, Enos," he might have said. Probably did, the manners his aunt had so carefully taught him never failed in situations like this. Watched the deputy tuck Bo's bagged dinner under his chin so he'd have a free hand to unlock the door. Reached out a hand to help, took Enos' burden from him, and probably even kicked the door closed for the uncoordinated deputy. Said good night to him and settled the food on his cot before it even crossed his mind how he needed to get out of here. The opportunity had been right there at his fingertips, and he'd grown so passive over the last several days that he didn't even try to take it.

(Luke needed him.)

Rosco's sudden and taunting presence, he reckoned, was punishment for being a cloudy-headed fool.

"What Rosco?" he asked, because the sooner he could get the sheriff out of here, the quicker he could get to trying to figure out how best to disobey Jesse's orders and free himself. Apologies could come later. Luke needed him now. "Ain't your mama gonna wonder why you ain't home for dinner?" It was meant to be funny, maybe. Or to make Rosco's stomach growl and remind him he had better places to be. But the man just stared at him, didn't even stutter, just stood there and looked wistful. So Bo sighed. "What do you want, Rosco?"

"I'll tell you what I want," he said, in that overly excited scream of his. "I want you to tell me where that Taylor girl is!"

More questioning. Going over ground they'd already covered, answers he'd already given and Rosco had _believed_ him, he was sure of it. "I already told you, Rosco, I don't know."

"Jit! Tiddly-tuddly. I know what you told me," and Rosco was coming closer, actually meeting his eyes for a change. "And I also know you're a Duke. And you Dukes lie, you just lie all the time."

Dang it all, Rosco was baiting him. For no good reason he could figure, just the two of them down here, no Boss forcing the sheriff to do it, no witnesses if Rosco succeeded in badgering him into confession. Luke was… he didn't even have time to think about where Luke was because Rosco was wasting both of their time with silly accusations.

"Rosco," and he was trying to stay calm, to think rationally, to figure out how Luke would handle this. He shook his head at the ridiculousness of it all. "Ain't never been a Duke that's lied to you, and you know it."

"Now you just listen here," and Rosco had the gall to swagger there right in front of the bars. Taunting, about how he was on the free side and Bo was trapped. "You better start giving me some answers or I'll—I'll just cuff you and stuff you—" too late, he'd already done that. "Ijit! And then I'll just—you'll be under the jail is where you'll be and won't nobody be able to help you then!"

It wasn't about who could help him, really. It was all about who Bo wouldn't be able to help. Damn it, Rosco needed to quit this fool's game and go home now, so Bo could take care of more important business.

"Rosco," he said, and his hands were in fists at his side. "I got a right to counsel if you're gonna go threatening me like this." _So go home until the morning when my lawyers can come back, _were his projected thoughts.

But Rosco wasn't Luke, couldn't read minds. Heck, the sheriff couldn't even hear his own thoughts over the babble of his brain.

"You don't scare me," the affronted sheriff hollered. "You and your counsel. You done been counseled already today." Right, Rosco was halfway there. Now if only he'd get the idea to go home and come back tomorrow, Bo could start working out a plan to get out of here. The keys were on the wall. He'd need something long to get to them. Maybe if he took the cot apart? "By your Uncle Jesse," Rosco was still babbling. "And your cousin Daisy." Of course there was that other set of keys on the sheriff's belt, but Rosco would have to—"Only one you ain't been counseled by is Luke. Where's your big, tough cousin when you need him?"—step up right up to the bars, just like that, where Bo could get ahold of his hat and his keys and—"Ijit!" came from where Rosco was pressed up against the bars by Bo's superior strength. "Bo Duke, don't you go escaping now!" Poor man was spread-eagled across the width of the bars. Bo ought to feel bad about that, and he'd be sure to get around to guilt later. "Don't you go…"

For now, though, he just pulled Rosco's hat brim down as far as it would go, then unhooked the keys from his belt. "Sorry Rosco," he said, but he didn't mean it. Let the man go, watched him stumble back far enough that Bo could get the keys into the lock and swing the door open.

He was free. (Luke needed him.)


	10. Luring the Right Buzz Out of a Bee

**Chapter Ten – Luring the Right Buzz Out of a Bee**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 19: The civil authority shall be superior to the military, and no soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, except by the civil magistrate, in such manner as may be provided by law.**_

How convenient. The ring still clenched in his fingers included a key to Rosco's cruiser. Good thing, because once he took the stairs two at a time, sprinted through the squad room and out into the dusk, Bo was winded. There was only so far his legs would've taken him anyway.

He didn't mean to complain or anything, but Rosco having presented him with a (suspiciously easy, but no time to think about that) opportunity for escape hadn't left him a chance to plan. A car was one thing. He was grateful for its convenience, and when he slid into the driver's seat and cranked it up, he was happy enough about its overall health. Must've been a new one, and what with him in jail and Luke out searching for horses or Miranda or anything that would clear him, there was no one to run poor Rosco into the pond. Which meant the car had some moves in it yet, a fact he proved by slamming it into gear and skating it around the perimeter of town square. Not the General, but it would do.

Would take him anywhere in a hurry, if only he knew where to go. Trying to think like Luke was—well it wasn't anything he'd ever gotten good at and it sure didn't mix with driving. Flying down the road or over a creek was about suspending thought and relying totally on belief. If a man had no faith that he could make a car go across that gully, well, he had no chance of succeeding. And thought – about the width and depth of the gully, and how hard the rocks at the bottom were likely to be – got in the way of making the leap.

Bo could drive or he could think, he couldn't do both. If he could figure out where Luke was, he wouldn't need a plan. He could handle whatever came, once he knew what it was he'd be handling. So it was simple, really. He needed to find Luke.

What had Daisy said, he was sick, Cooter had brought him home shivering and coughing and complaining about needing to go back to… she hadn't said where.

The car skimmed around a corner, throwing gravel and just missing a tree. Time to stop thinking, so he sighed and bit his lip. It was only a matter of time before news of his escape hit the airwaves anyway.

So he sighed and picked up the C.B., tuning it away from the police channel to the Duke boys' usual. "Lost Sheep calling Crazy Cooter," he said. The mechanic, at least, wouldn't bother with a lecture before telling him what he needed to know.

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_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 20: The power of the Courts to punish for contempt shall be limited by legislative acts.**_

Well if that didn't just tear the feathers out of a duck.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Uncle Jesse, sir," Enos said, and Jesse could just see him twisting his hat in his hands, even if he must've been using at least one of them to hold the phone. "Sheriff Coltrane, he just told me to let you know." That Bo had escaped, that idiot fool. With charges of horse rustling and kidnapping against him. The one thing he'd made Bo promise not to do. "And to stand by here at the county building, in case I was needed," Enos continued, interrupting Jesse's thoughts.

"And, uh," oh those boys of his. As if the day hadn't already been ongoing frustration, from the moment Daisy showed up in town, with her head hanging and no Luke at her side. Jesse reckoned the boy would be home soon, before dark, and he was doing some serious looking forward to giving Luke what for. Now he had both boys to worry about. "He didn't ask you to call no one else?" Because they sure didn't need the state police getting called in to go after his errant nephew.

"No sir, Uncle Jesse. Just said to call you and stand by." Cheerful boy, that Enos was, with absolutely no idea what kind of trouble Bo might be facing out there. "Was there someone you wanted me to call?" Helpful too. To a fault.

"No thank you, Enos." Far be it for him to suggest that any authorities needed to be called in. All the better that Rosco had apparently decided to handle things himself. "We'll be there soon."

To stare at an empty jail cell, to look for clues about how it had happened, maybe. To make sure there was no sign of violent struggle (but of course there wouldn't have been) or genuine vandalism (because Dukes didn't need to resort to harming property or people to get out of jail). He wasn't sure why he'd dragged Daisy down here, honestly, and while it had made a certain amount of sense to contact Bo's lawyers, that decision was quickly becoming regrettable.

"Now, Mr. Duke," Haddad was nattering. "I cannot do my job effectively if the client isn't going to listen to me, arright?"

Yeah, well. Bo hadn't ever been the best listener. Seemed to Jesse like he brought home more than one report card that indicated he'd do a lot better in school if he'd just _listen_.

Gary Butler's tongue clucked in dismay. He looked a bit rumpled, clothes less than perfect, like when the sun slid toward the horizon and he went off-duty, his wardrobe did, too. Overall, it was the most appealing Jesse had ever seen the man look.

Of course, Haddad looked just as casual come evening as he ever had in the day. "It doesn't look good for Bo's innocence if he goes breaking out of jail, arright?"

So far the lawyerly counsel of the evening had been far less than stellar. It would seem that if a man was going to get paid to say things, at least the information he gave would be something more informative and useful than basic common sense.

"Enos," Jesse said, because they were all wasting time standing here staring at an empty jail cell. "You're sure Rosco didn't say anything about where he was headed?"

"No, sir. He just said he was in hot pursuit, and he was gonna get 'im this time," Enos answered mournfully. Seemed to break Enos' heart that he couldn't give the Dukes more useful information, and it made Jesse wish his boys would be half as kind to his old heart.

"You sure, Enos sugar?" Daisy tried, because maybe honey was the best way to lure the right buzz out of this bee. But Jesse knew better; no amount of stroking Enos' arm or his ego would get him to remember things that hadn't happened. The man didn't know. And neither Bo nor Rosco was answering the C.B., so whatever clues Jesse was going to get had to come from somewhere in this room.

"It would be best for all concerned if he turned himself in, arright?" Alex Haddad advised, oblivious to the fact that Jesse wasn't paying him any mind. Daisy was, though. Dark look to her eyes like she was on the verge of yelling at the man, maybe about how Dukes had more pride than to offer their wrists to the law for cuffing. "And explained how he was just scared."

"Bo ain't scared," Daisy snapped, and Jesse held up a hand to stay whatever words she was about to unleash on the man. No point in wasting her energy that way. They needed to be thinking, not having useless arguments. "Well he ain't!" Daisy insisted, and she wouldn't have been his girl if she didn't.

Haddad had no idea how to take a hint. "Arright, but it would be better if he said he was," and furthermore, clearly didn't know when his advice was being studiously, carefully, ignored. "That it was an impulsive decision, arright?"

Jesse kept his eyes fixed on Daisy, standing in the doorway with Enos at her side. The lawyers were between them, and his girl was getting ready to give one or both of them a fairly serious tongue lashing. Just the tiniest shake of Jesse's head and she bit her tongue. Looked like it hurt her, too, but she was going to do what he wanted. Still, the girl had a point. For all the ways Bo had managed to drive the whole family to distraction, it was never cowardice that made him do it. In fact, if anything, it was usually the opposite; even Luke would cringe as some of the wild ways that Bo's anger made him brave.

"Because if it was premeditated, that makes him look guilty, arright? Like he expected to get convicted," the boy's counsel kept on chattering along.

Premeditated, maybe not. But not impulsive either. Jesse had told Bo to stay put, had gotten the boy's word. The word of a Duke, which was solid unless—

"Daisy," he interrupted whatever the lawyer was rambling on about now. "You sure Luke didn't say where he was going this morning?" She'd already sworn she didn't know her oldest cousin's plans, only that he'd convinced her to let him slip away.

"No, sir," she answered. "He didn't tell me noth—"

"Oh, now if he had an accomplice in his jailbreak, and if it was his cousin, well there's almost no way I can defend against _that_, arright?" the fancy Washington lawyer complained. "That makes the whole horse rustling and kidnapping seem like a conspiracy, a premeditated crime planned by both men, arright?"

No, actually, it wasn't all right.

"Uncle Jesse," was Daisy's request to defend her cousins, but he put a hand up to stop her.

"You might just want to reconsider what your jaws are a-flappin' about there, Mr. Haddad." Calm, he stayed calm, because whippersnappers needed to be taught their manners, and yelling at them wasn't setting a good example. But he stared the boy down, same as he would his own children when they got a little too big for their breeches. "You might have learned a lot of things in school. And I reckon you've got good cause to think you know most everything about the law. But what you don't know is them boys of mine."

"I know they're on probation, arright? And it's hard enough to make them look innocent with that. Throw in jailbreak and—"

"Make them _look_ innocent?" Of all the—"Bo done told you he don't know where them horses or that girl is. He ain't never wavered on that, no matter who done the questioning." Enos was cowering back towards the stairs, as if his hide was in serious jeopardy of being tanned. Same silly boy he'd ever been; Jesse had no harmful intentions toward him. That fancy lawyer, though, who was opening his mouth to speak, even as his friend grabbed his arm to hold him off, that there was a boy who was about to get a whipping. "And!" made everything stop; Enos stood still from where he'd been considering a dash up the stairs, Daisy's proud chin and smoldering eyes kept themselves fixed on out-of-town fools who didn't have a lick of sense, Gary Butler's hand stayed clenched around his friend's upper arm, and mercifully, Haddad's lips froze, mid-flap. "Two things you should know about Bo and Luke. First!" Everyone was still frozen, seemed like he'd finally managed to get their attention. "They don't, neither of them, lie. Ever. And second, they'd do anything, anything! For each other. Which don't mean breaking Bo out of here because he ain't man enough to face charges. It means—"

"It means Bo must've thought Luke was in trouble," Daisy finished, wide-eyed. Yeah, that was where Jesse was leading, eventually. He'd had a few more things to say about integrity and honesty and how his boys had more in each of their little fingers than any slick city lawyer ever hoped to, but it was just as well that Daisy cut straight to the chase. There really wasn't time to make all the points he'd wanted, but they could come back to those later.

"And Luke didn't say where he was going," he prompted Daisy. "You sure?"

"No sir," but the answer wasn't dejected, it was more of a place marker. "But Cooter said the only thing Luke wanted last night was to go back up to the old Hastings Horse Camp and look around some more."

"All right, then," was Jesse's assessment. "What are we wasting time for? Let's get going," and he was halfway to the staircase before the sentence was done coming out of his mouth.

_**

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**_

Georgia Bill or Rights, Paragraph 21: There shall be no imprisonment for debt.

"Miranda," he yelled and she cowered from him. Probably should have said it nicer, more gently and suited to the fairer sex, but there she was, standing at the far end of the stable, fully alive and healthy. Meanwhile it had been five days, _five days_, that Bo was locked up and suspected of doing her harm. She had to know what was going on, was obviously complicit in it, or else she would have showed her face at the farm before now.

It was dim inside, twilight seeping in through dusty windows didn't do much to light the place. There was a lantern down there by where Miranda had been soothing a handsome, chestnut horse, but it wasn't much to see by.

"Luke," the girl answered, and it was defeated and scared. Maybe asking him not to wring her neck, like he wanted to. "I—"

But she cringed further back into her corner, like she really thought he'd hit her. He was angry, oh, he was spitting mad and she was about to get an earful, but he knew better than to raise a finger to hurt her. Lessons from childhood, when his temper had loomed larger than his skinny boy's physique, the words of his aunt rattled through his brain. About how you didn't go pounding on people that were smaller, weaker, or weren't fighting back.

He slipped his hands into his back pockets; safe there where it wouldn't look like he had any real intentions of hurting Miranda.

"That's Henry, ain't it?" The Miller horse, one of the two that was missing. Weren't many horses in Hazzard that size; Henry was built like Bo with a broad chest and long legs. Must be why his cousin chose to ride him so often.

Miranda nodded, still eyeing him carefully as he took a few steps in her direction. It was starting to get annoying how little this girl trusted her safety with him. Oh, he had every intention of making sure she wound up in jail, but damn it, he wasn't going to hurt her.

"Where's Rainbow?" Not that it really mattered right now. It wasn't like either horse would fit in the General's back seat, and he didn't exactly have a trailer hitched to the tow ball. Really, best thing he could do tonight would be to bring Miranda to town and make sure she admitted that Bo had nothing to do with the missing horses or her own disappearance.

She was a pretty thing, Luke had to admit that. Not his type, but he could see how Bo liked her, how her delicate frame must have made him feel big and strong.

"I don't know," was the defensive answer. "I really don't!" Again, as if she were being threatened, when he was just walking closer, slowly, no sudden moves or anything. "He got sold, I don't know who to."

Luke just nodded; no point in pressing the girl. Either she had more information or she didn't, and it was Rosco's job to get it from her, not his. Two more steps toward her with the simple intention of making the undeniable request that she join him on a trip into town, but she spooked. Nowhere to go, her head dipped down so her eyes were hidden in her hair; a child's belief that if she couldn't see him, he couldn't see her.

Luke sighed. "Are you all right, Miranda?" he asked. Didn't want to, had the perfectly reasonable instinct to maintain his righteous anger, but it was only neighborly to ask polite questions before hauling your cousin's girlfriend down to the sheriff's station for questioning.

"Fine," she answered, but she wasn't. Dang it all. It was a narrow space, a hallway between stalls, and he had her cornered at the end. It was the perfect way to act with someone who had harmed his cousin, and no way to treat a frightened girl. There was a good-sized feed bucket in the stall to his left, so he fished it out and overturned it. Sat down and it was so low he was practically looking up at her from between his knees, but it made for a comfortable place to rest himself, anyway. Gave him a different view of the girl's face, too.

"Benjamin ever hurt you, Miranda?" Didn't want to know the answer, but he had to if he was going to do the right thing.

"No," she answered and it was a lie. "Not on purpose." A lie she needed to believe, maybe. "He just," Miranda shook her hair out of her eyes, letting him get a good look at her, finally. Nothing too serious there, just some fading marks. Only the kind of thing that would make him go after anyone who ever did that to Daisy with the kind of violence that would make them understand that you never hurt a woman that way. "My dad always picked on him. He's the oldest and Dad always reckoned he should know better." Yeah, Luke could relate to that. "Anyway, he don't mean to, but he just gets mad sometimes."

"Miranda," the girl was a fool. She'd left home to get away from a father that Luke could only assume was abusive, but she'd gone with a brother that was equally as rough with her. He shook his head at the stupidity of it.

"Luke Duke," she snapped, and while she hadn't entirely come out of the corner, she was standing upright like she hadn't since he'd entered this stable. "Don't you start telling me what I should do." Vehemence, and who would've expected it? "Benjamin is my brother, and I love my brothers, all of them. He's family, and it seems to me you should understand that!"

Oh, this was ridiculous. Family was who you counted on to help when outsiders hurt you. "Miranda," he tried again. The girl had to know she wasn't making any sense.

"Are you seriously going to tell me that Bo ain't never made you so angry you couldn't think of nothing else to do?" Her voice was angry, bitter. "You gonna say you never hit Bo, not once?"

Yeah, he'd hit Bo. He'd meant it, too, hit him hard enough that his nose bled. Hurt him bad enough that he'd left the farm in tears, intent on spending his life with Diane Benson.

Yeah, he'd hit Bo, but it was for his cousin's own good. Bo was blind when it came to women, wanted to believe what they said, even when it was clear as day that they were using him.

Yeah, he'd hit Bo, but it wasn't the same thing. Bo hit him first, and Bo was his equal, or nearly, in strength. The girl had no right to ask about that, it wasn't any of her business, anyway. The girl was—

Not looking anymore, her eyes were fixed beyond him. He was a fool, he'd let her confuse him and distract him and—

He turned around in time to see the board coming down before it hit his head. Damn it. Two days in a row that he'd been so close he could just about taste it and now—


	11. So Many Hides, So Little Time

**Chapter Eleven – So Many Hides, So Little Time**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 22: The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but the General Assembly shall have power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne.**_

"I got 'im, I got 'im!" So what if all he had was a trail of dust that threatened to choke him as it hung in the last, pink light of the day. That might be all he'd ever had that was actually worth anything. A Duke boy locked in Rosco's jail had nothing on a semi-cold trail to be followed at high speed, trees looming on either side, threatening to pluck the cruiser right off the road and cradle it in their branches.

That was the flaw in the slaw, actually. He'd wound up in the wrong car, sacrificing his cruiser to the likes of Bo Duke (who wouldn't even scratch the paint, but that wasn't the point). Then again, it had been exhausting coming up with as much of a plan as he had; if one niggling detail – like how the Duke boy was going to wind up with the keys to the wrong police car – had slipped his mind, he could be forgiven.

His little fat buddy was a clever man, proud of himself for every plot he hatched. And Rosco was proud of him too, for coming up with so many ways to raise funds, fifty percent of fifty percent of which Rosco theoretically got to keep. So in order to set things right in his world, to liberate Bo Duke to commit future misdemeanors, Rosco had to be very smart in setting him free from the current felony charges. Clever enough to appear both idiotic and innocent, when the time came that his boss learned that one of them wily Dukes had escaped. It'd been awhile since he'd had to work at convincing anyone that he was incompetent.

Bo Duke had himself a pretty serious head start. More than he was supposed to, but Rosco had forgotten to calculate how long it would take to haul Flash from the squad room out to where she was riding shotgun right now. And he couldn't have left her behind, oh no, she was a critical part of hot pursuit. Her demeanor kept him calm when the road started to swerve unpredictably, when ponds jumped in front of him, their still water beckoning the car to jump right on in and make some waves. Besides, Flash was a tracking dog, and he needed her when he was on the trail of one of those Duke boys.

And then he'd also had to stop and call Enos, get him to relay the information of Bo's escape to the Dukes, so they'd know where he was. Not knowing what had happened to Miranda Taylor had driven Rosco to distraction, not to mention what it had done to Bo and others that cared about her. He reckoned the Duke family would go crazy if they didn't know what had happened to the youngest of their brood.

But he didn't want Enos in on the chase, too. Oh, no, this was Rosco's hunt, and if there was one thing the past five days had taught him, it was that Dukes were fun to chase, but catching them only led to broken hearts and misery. No, he had no plans of catching Bo Duke, just chasing him with all the energy in his soul.

Which was why Rosco turned off his siren, even as he nudged at the accelerator to increase the car's speed to dangerous levels.

_**

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**_

Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 23: The legislative, judicial, and executive powers shall forever remain separate and distinct, and no person discharging the duties of one, shall, at the same time, exercise the functions of either of the others, except as herein provided.

Luke was, if nothing else, predictable in his meticulousness. The man made a new plan at least once a week, and each was as different as the unchanging scenery of Hazzard would allow. The underlying structure, though, that part never wavered. _Be careful, Bo_ he'd say, followed by _don't be in such a hurry that you leave your brains behind_. And they'd be off on a Luke Duke scheme.

In all the years since they'd run moonshine, neither of them had forgotten how to hide a car. Didn't take any time at all, just some bushes. And there the General was, peeking out from behind branches that were just starting to go bare in anticipation of winter. Cooter was right, Luke was up here somewhere at the old Hastings Horse Farm.

Bo reckoned it would only be a matter of a few minutes before the mechanic arrived here, too. He left Rosco's gleaming white cruiser right out in the open as a beacon, because Cooter wasn't anything close to a moonshiner. Not quiet or subtle in any way, and the one time he'd tried to make the stuff, he'd blown a vat. Didn't stop him from appreciating a good gulp every now and then, of course. But since the man had no moonshiner instincts, and Bo had no intentions of acquiescing to the Cooter's request to not to go checking out the old camp alone, to wait for backup first, the least he could do would be to leave a visible trail.

To where, of course, he had no idea. This place was every bit as sprawling as it had ever been when he was a kid, except now it was thick with untrimmed undergrowth and sapling trees. The structures that still stood were in disrepair, but there were all kinds: the old mess hall was at the far end of what had once been an open field, the lean-tos where kids had slept, now nearly swallowed by some very healthy looking poison ivy, and then there were barns and stables and somewhere out there, there were probably the ruins of the latrines. Too many choices and not enough light, and Bo had no desire to stand around trying to make logical decisions, so he moved forward into the dark ruins haunted by happy childhood memories.

Fading sunlight turned out not to matter, not when he heard a scream. Wasn't Luke's, wasn't any man's, but that didn't matter. It was just the first sound of several, got followed by bumps, crashes, and as Bo sprinted closer to the structure in question, one of the abandoned stables, he could hear grunts of pain, and skin hitting skin, bodies hitting wood and the occasional complaining neigh of a horse.

The doors were at the far end, extra steps and his lungs were already burning like they always had when he ran this hard. No time to gather his breath, which was a real shame, considering he'd need a reasonable amount of air to face whatever was waiting inside for him.

Then again, he'd long ago learned that breathing was less important than Luke.

His entrance to the stable was less than graceful; fortunately no one was looking in his direction. Gave him a second to stumble over his own feet in his hurry, catching himself on the low wall of the nearest enclosure. Meant a splinter in his palm, but later would be a fine time to worry about that. Right now he had to figure out how to even the odds in a fight that was taking place down toward the other end of the structure, in a corner that was better lit than where Bo was standing right now. Gave him a pretty clear view of the goings-on.

Luke wasn't doing too well, but that was to be expected, what with the way there were two men against him. Benjamin Taylor had himself a two-by-six, and he wasn't shy about swinging it. Luke had to duck and weave to avoid being hit, and it looked like he hadn't always succeeded in getting himself missed, what with the trickle of blood at his temple. Didn't look serious, not yet, but if Benjamin got him cornered with no place to run, things could get ugly fast.

"Hey!" Bo yelled and it wasn't the most intelligent thing he'd ever come out with. Then again, he hadn't taken the time to prepare a proper speech, about how two on one wasn't fair and how no one messed with one Duke boy without getting the other. Benjamin turned to face him, but dismissed him immediately. The other man, a stranger whose face was familiar all the same, let his eyes linger on Bo. Must've decided Benjamin could handle Luke alone, because he took a few steps and planted himself right in Bo's path.

"Bo!" And that came from the shape in the corner he'd recognized right away, but not let his thoughts dwell on. Miranda was alive, well, and watching her brother beat on Luke. "Wilburn, no! Don't!" Make that two of Miranda's brothers, ganging up on Luke.

Could have been Miranda's request or it might just have been that Wilburn lacked the violent aggressiveness of his older brother. Whichever it was, the man's primary goal didn't seem to be fighting Bo, more like blocking his access to where the real battle was going on. An honorable man might not have swung at the Taylor boy, not unless he'd been punched first. But Bo didn't have time to be honorable, not when Benjamin still hadn't put down his weapon. So he let his fist fly of its own accord. Turned out to be a mistake when his knuckles struck bone then grazed against teeth. Hurt like the time Maudine had bitten him, made him wish he had tougher hands. Funny how Luke never had to shake out his fingers after a punch.

Wilburn didn't appear to enjoy getting hit any more than Bo liked hitting him. Stumbled, growled and spat before he turned back to Bo with his arm drawn back. Couldn't have been much of a fighter, old Wilburn, what with the way he telegraphed his moves. An attempt at a roundhouse than missed, because Bo knew exactly when to duck. Left Wilburn off kilter, made him trip over his own feet and right into Bo, and it was instinct that made Bo shove him away until the other man's back hit the wood of a stall. Didn't knock the wall over, but it shook and pulled against the nails that fastened it to the weight-bearing beam.

"Luke!" he called into the space that Wilburn had been occupying, but he wasn't about to get any closer to his cousin yet. Wilburn was back on his feet, looking for more, while Miranda screamed at them both to stop.

It was a waste of time, really, combating this man, when it was the other one that had been pounding on Luke. So whatever gentlemanly instincts Bo had left got thrown to the wind. He linked his fingers in a move that Luke had taught him long ago, when he was small and had skinny arms. Turned sideways and brought both hands back, then swung through like he'd been pitched a low ball in a friendly playground game of baseball. His elbow made contact with Wilbrun's diaphragm, and the man doubled over. Sputtered, coughed, wheezed, and by that time Bo had pulled his left fist back for the final blow. Wilburn went down and didn't move.

"Luke!" he hollered again.

"Bo," he got in response, and it wasn't a good sound, nothing Bo was used to hearing. It was a request for help, an admission that Luke was in trouble. The kind of sound he'd only heard once before, a few years back, when Luke's wrist was tied to that giant ape, Patch, his knuckles not an inch from a cactus that would leave him with a permanent open wound.

Where he wasn't bone, Luke was muscle. Strong, but not big. And right about now, Benjamin was towering over him, and still armed with that two-by-six. As he advanced on the board-wielding man's back, Bo's mind was filled with nothing but images of tearing the Taylor boy apart with a kind of violence that Uncle Jesse would tan his hide for.

"Bo, don't!" was Miranda, hard to say whether she was trying to protect him from Benjamin or the other way around. Didn't matter, what came now wasn't anything she could stop. Bo caught the end of the two-by-six as Benjamin was pulling it back for another go at his cousin. It got wrenched back out from his hands, adding insult to the injuries already there. But that would have to go on the growing list of things to be worried about later, because Benjamin wheeled on him then, swinging his weapon as he came.

And that was fine, that was good, if he was trying to wallop Bo, at least he couldn't be beating on Luke, who was already hurt. The first swing went wild, and the second was just the recoil of the first, so Bo easily ducked away from both. Benjamin was setting up for a third, and Bo started backing. Coward's way to fight, with a six foot long board. A man never had to get near enough that his opponent could lay a hand on him, never had to get a real good and close up look at the pain he was causing, either. Just a few solid hits and he could walk away without any aches – physical or emotional – of his own. With the possible exception of a splinter or two, and Bo hoped that whaling on Luke had left more than a few bloody dings in Benjamin's hands.

"Watch it, Bo!" That was Luke, warning him too late, because he'd already stumbled backward over Wilburn's prone form. Landed on his backside and knocked whatever small breath he'd had in his lungs right back out. Benjamin's stance changed; no longer needing to swing the board horizontally, he lifted his arms straight up in preparation for bringing it straight down onto Bo's head. Crab-crawling on all fours, Bo quickly came to the conclusion that he really had nowhere to go. In an instant, his back was up against a stall divider, which left him looking up at knots in the wood as it started to swing his way, and thinking about how much this was going to hurt. He ducked his head, put his arm up defensively, and waited for the pain.

Which never came. There was a growl instead, some kind of half-cursed complaint, and by the time Bo looked up from where he'd never gotten hit, Luke was there, clinging to Benjamin's wide back, arms up and around the other man's neck, but not choking, Luke would never stoop to that. His legs were low, tight around the Taylor boy's thighs, restricting his mobility. Luke might not be very big, but he was dead weight, like having a two-hundred pound, writhing, rock hung on your back. Had to pity Benjamin Taylor a little bit.

Not much, though, not when his stumbling feet stepped on Bo's ankle. Bo wouldn't give up even an inch of his own height when he was standing up, but when he was sitting down like this he always had too much leg. He hollered in pain, but the weight was gone from his ankle almost instantly, as Benjamin, with Luke still clinging to his back, started to careen towards the floor. Stuck his hands out to catch himself and finally, mercifully, let go of the stupid board.

From there it was simple. As Benjamin went down, Bo pulled himself up on the stall divider. Took a second to test his weight on that ankle; seemed fine, was probably nothing more than a bruise. He watched as Luke stood up, dragging Benjamin with him, then caught his cousin's eye. A nod, and Luke went first, a good, solid blow to the man's jaw. Rattled his teeth and left him stunned, but still on his feet. Luke stepped back and gave Bo a go. Left handed, had to be, because Luke was there to his right, not leaving him enough room to get leverage. But Bo's fist came sailing from low, down near his hip, around behind him and up to hit the man's cheek, just below his eye, and Benjamin Taylor went down. Slow, one joint at a time, knees bent, backside hitting the ground followed by the grunt of air getting forced out of the lungs, rolling back until his shoulders hit the straw-covered floor, followed by a resounding thunk of head on concrete. Benjamin was done.

No sound then, except heavy breathing. His, Luke's, and somewhere back there, Miranda was crying, but she hadn't made a move to help any of them – not Luke, not Bo, not her brothers, not even herself.

"You all right?" he asked Luke. Got a nod in response. He should have known better, sick and thrashed over the head a few times, of course Luke was just fine.

"You're bleeding," Luke pointed out. And that was cheating, making Bo worry about himself now, when clearly Luke had taken the worse beating. (But he was bleeding? Where and how badly?)

Luke had hold of his wrist, was turning his hand over to get a better look at his palm where, yes, there was more blood than Bo would have thought, must've gotten something bigger than a splinter somewhere along the way. Tsking at the blood or the dirt that was likely to get into the cut and infect it (because Luke always expected the worst to happen), reaching for his back pocket and the rag of a handkerchief that was always there. How many times in his life had Luke stood over him like this, fixing whatever had hurt him? Jud, well Jud was only here a few days, and yes, he'd turned their lives upside down. But he hadn't taken Luke away from Bo, his cousin was still here, dabbing at the blood on Bo's hands in exactly the same way he had when they were little boys and Bo had scraped himself sliding into second base. It was enough to make a man want to fling his arms around Luke and thank him for always being there.

Fortunately Cooter burst in before Bo could give in to that impulse, because Luke would never have tolerated it, not while Bo was still bleeding.

"Dang it," their friend complained. "You done tol' me there was gonna be a fight, Bo. I said 'wait for me,' but you didn't and now there ain't no one for me to hit!" Made Luke snicker and shake his head at fool mechanics who didn't know any better.

"Prob'ly for the best," Luke informed him, from where he was still looking for the source of Bo's bleeding. "Palm flat, Bo," he said, none too gently forcing his hand into the most convenient angle to wipe away the blood. "You ain't as young as you used to be, Cooter." It was true, once upon a time Cooter had fought as wildly and with the kind of abandon that only a man that was three sheets to the wind could. Now he was settled, calm, and still liked a good fight, but he probably hadn't been up to this one. "Make a fist around the rag, Bo."

"Do me a favor," Bo asked Cooter, because Luke was turning his hand over to tie a knot in the rag as a makeshift bandage. He wouldn't be getting out of Luke's clutches until his cousin was satisfied that he wouldn't bleed to death from a few splinters. "Take care of her." He used his head to nod in the general direction of where Miranda was huddled into herself, crying at the far end of the stables, the spot she hadn't moved from since he came in the doors. Cooter looked up, registered her presence with a raised eyebrow, then nodded as he stepped around the Dukes to get to her.

"Let me see your foot, Bo," Luke was saying. It was there on his tongue to refuse, but, "Sit down," was Luke forcing the issue before Bo could even object.

And it worked out fine, was kind of perfect, actually. Because Luke knelt in front of where he sat, tugging at his boot. Close, quiet little place down here on the floor of the stables where Bo could reach out a hand and wipe at the blood on Luke's temple. His cousin shook his head at the foolishness of such an act, but gently, not hard enough to get Bo's fingers away from exploring his hairline for the source of the blood. "It's my ankle, not my foot," he muttered into the private space they'd created for themselves here, just to keep Luke from wasting time poking at the wrong places.

It was into the peacefulness that settled into a structure in which two men were out cold, another was comforting a distraught girl, a horse was nickering quietly, and he and Luke were assuring themselves that they were both still alive, that Rosco Coltrane came bursting.

"Freeze, freeze!" he screamed into the dim silence, and the absurdity of it all made Bo and Luke collapse toward each other in genuine laughter.

_**

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Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 24: The people have the right to assemble peaceably for their common good and to apply to those vested with the powers of government for redress of grievances by petition or remonstrance.

So many hides that needed to be tanned, and Jesse was the only one with enough of a lick of sense to do it. His arm would near-about fall off if he actually had to whip everyone that deserved it tonight. Still he ought to do it, and right here out in the open space of the old Hastings Horse Farm, with the moon for a witness, to attest that they'd all been properly punished.

Starting with Luke, who'd played on Daisy's gentle sympathy to slip away this morning against the doctor's orders and Jesse's own. And then there was his girl, who had let the good judgment be talked right out of her by one of her less levelheaded cousins. Her other fool cousin was a fugitive from the law, and come to think of it, Rosco could use a good whipping too, for not keeping a better eye on Jesse's boy (oh, but Rosco didn't have a better eye, so it wouldn't be fair to take a whip to him). Cooter over there had known that Bo was on the loose and had chosen to chase him up here rather than call the boy's old uncle and let him know what was going on. And that girl there, weeping in Cooter's arms, Jesse wanted to tan her hide for letting Bo take the rap for crimes her brothers had committed. Her brothers, well, they'd already been pretty well whipped by Bo and Luke. Conscious now, but he'd bet dimes to donuts they hadn't been a few minutes ago. The only one that didn't deserve Jesse's wrath at the moment was Enos, who'd come along for the ride and was now giggling up a storm at the bounty that had fallen into his lap. Two criminals, already cuffed and stuffed.

Which left Jesse's tanning arm just itching for a workout, but there'd be time for that later.

"Follow me," Jesse ordered, as the whole throng of fools-in-need-of-whippings organized themselves into cars.

"But we ain't read them their rights yet," was Enos' complaint as Rosco began to shove the two Taylor boys into the back seat of his cruiser (which it turned out Bo had "borrowed" to get himself up here, and Jesse would just have to add one more lick to Bo's share of the punishment).

"Enos, you dipstick!" The sheriff seemed in fine form tonight, screaming his orders with glee. "They ain't got no rights!" Which was Hazzard's version of law if ever Jesse had heard it.

"But She'ff!" Enos objected.

"Ijit, Enos! Just get the girl in your car and we'll read them their rights at the station, all right?" Ah, poor Rosco, having to suffer fools. The man didn't have a clue what real suffering was.

"I'm sorry, Cooter, I'm going to have to take Miss Miranda there," Enos said, though Cooter didn't seem too broken up about it. "Sorry, Bo." Yeah, that was the one who needed an apology and it shouldn't be coming from Enos. Still, his youngest seemed to be holding up all right.

"You all right to drive, Bo?" he asked, but it was so much wasted breath. Jesse couldn't think of a single time in his adult life when Bo hadn't been all right to drive. Boy could probably manage to get safely from out here where the trees were thick and the roads were rutted, all the way into the middle of downtown Atlanta, even if he was out cold. But they weren't going that far.

"I'm fine, Uncle Jesse," Bo answered, and if that wasn't entirely true, Jesse reckoned getting behind the wheel of the General wouldn't do the boy any harm, and might just make him feel better.

"Follow me," Jesse ordered again, now that everyone was sorted out as to which car they were riding in. "All of you, now," he added, because he didn't need anyone sneaking off on their own again tonight.

Not when he had a little detour planned on the way to the courthouse.

Which was how the whole mob of them came to be standing outside of J.D. Hogg's house while Jesse pounded on the door. Found the civility within himself to say, "Why good evening, Miss Lulu," when the lady of the house answered.

"Come in, come in," Lulu offered, first to Jesse, then to the crowd behind him.

Bless her sweet heart, but, "No, that wouldn't be fitting. My boys been rolling in the dirt," one scalding look in Bo and Luke's direction, but they didn't seem exactly repentant, not with those self-congratulatory smirks on their faces. "We'd, uh, we'd just like to see J.D. if you don't mind." Kept his voice low and calm so the man wouldn't spook, but it was no use. Jesse could hear him squealing in the background, then some kind of a scuffle like a man looking for way to escape.

"Excuse me," Lulu said, all sugar and spice, before turning around and hollering "J.D.!" loud enough to get dead men up out of their graves and complaining about the noise from as far north as Tennessee. The door closed, but the scuffle continued, loud enough that all assembled could keep tabs on it. Seemed the commissioner's first choice was to attempt to hide in the front closet, followed by whatever kind of a mad dash up the stairs an old man with a fifty inch waist could make. There were mutterings and complaints denials and finally begging, but eventually the door opened again, and there was J.D., held in place by his wife's fingers on his earlobe.

"What—" Boss started to demand, but Lulu gave that particular part of his anatomy a not-so-gentle tug. "I mean, good evening, Jesse, everyone." Oh, it was in that tone the man used when he was trying to sweet talk his way out of immediate danger, but Jesse wasn't going to fall for it, not for a second.

"Mr. Hogg," he answered, and if he'd been wearing his hat, he would have doffed it. It was the first time J.D. had been seen outdoors after sundown since he used to run moonshine as a youngster. Interesting how the only man who feared getting mugged on the dark streets of Hazzard was the county's commissioner. "As you can see, we've got quite an assembly here."

"Yes," J.D. agreed, while his eyes grew wide at exactly who the crowd included. "We do. And Bo Duke, what are you doing out of jail? Rosco, arrest him! And his no good cousin, for aiding and abetting a jailbreak!"

"Now you just wait a dang minute, Boss!" Bo's mouth, it got more situations derailed than a malfunctioning switch on a railroad track. "Luke didn't have nothing to do with—"

"As I was saying," Jesse interrupted. Cold stare at Bo to make him freeze right where he was. And it turned out the boy still had some sense in him, because he left off with the complaining. All right, one less lashing for that nephew – he was going to need Boss's adding machine to keep tallies. "We've got quite the assembly here. Including some folks I think you know. Benjamin Taylor, and his brother Wilburn, for two."

"I don't know them," Boss answered, and it was too fast to be anything but automatic.

"You don't, huh?" Jesse asked. "You're real sure about that, Mr. Hogg? Because them boys've been rustling horses. Why, Bo and Luke found them with one of Orren Miller's missing horses in their possession." Boss's eyes shifted from one member of the group to another, like he was trying to figure out who his best ally was.

"That there is a fact," Luke agreed with a firm nod. Bo, smart boy, stayed quiet.

Boss was an intelligent enough man. He could add two plus two and come up with a hundred thousand dollars to line his pockets. Then again, he knew well enough that sometimes it was best if two and two just added up to four.

"So what you're telling me is that Bo is innocent," Boss said, nodding. Lulu let go of her husband's ear, probably figuring he was well enough trained to behave now.

"That's what I'm telling you," Jesse agreed.

"And that the only ones who are guilty are them Taylor boys," was the commissioner's next assessment.

"Well, now," Jesse reminded him. "We don't know that for a fact, yet. We're going to have to wait and see what Rosco's investigation reveals." He enunciated carefully so that even the slowest amongst the group could keep up with him.

"Rosco's investigation ain't going to reveal nothing!" Boss snapped, and Lulu had hold of his earlobe again in seconds. "I mean, I'm sure the sheriff's investigation will be thorough. And it will show that these Taylor boys was working all alone."

Jesse heard some grumbling dissent behind him, but it was quickly stifled by Rosco: "Pipe down you two. Ain't no one asked you your opinion. You'll get your day in court." And that was fine. Jesse reckoned when the time came, he hoped the Taylor boys wound up with a lawyer just as charming as Alex Haddad. In fact, maybe he'd even recommend the man to them.

"Well then," Jesse said. "If them boys was working all alone, you had Bo arrested under false pretenses." Looked Lulu right in the eyes, because they both knew the man was about to start objecting, and she was the only one that could keep him straight right now.

"Now just you wait a minute, Jesse Duke—" and though it was well past dinner time, the man's fat finger was greasy when it came up to point at his chest. Clearly this visit had interrupted some very important snacking.

"J.D.," Lulu hollered, and it was shrill. Hurt Jesse's ears from several feet away. As close as Boss was, it was amazing his eardrums stayed intact. "You had Bo Duke arrested on horse-thieving charges?" Went to show how little she knew about her husband's activities.

"I did," Boss admitted. "But it was a terrible, terrible mistake."

"One you're about to apologize for," Jesse suggested, as Lulu twisted that fat earlobe.

"I am, I am!" the man hollered, until Lulu let up enough for him to go on. "Bo Duke," he said, and there were tears in his voice. Whether it was because of the grave injury to his earlobe or because he never in his life wanted to say what he was about to, Jesse didn't know. "I'm sorry I had you arrested."

"Thank you Mr. Hogg, Miss Lulu," Jesse said. "And good night. I reckon we all got places we need to be right now." Jesse turned around to face the formidable group. "Don't we?" he added.

There was nodding and muttered "yes, sirs," as the crowd began to disassemble. The door closed behind him as Lulu dragged her complaining husband inside.

In less than a minute, the only ones left standing in front of him were the three kids he'd raised, all of which were in need of a whipping. But that would have to wait. Luke needed sleep, Bo needed a decent meal, and Daisy had a hankering need to take care of them both.

"Let's go home," was all he said to the three of them.


	12. Of Course You Can

**_Authors's Note:_ **_And so another one comes to an end. This one was fun to write, because the conflict was always external, and there was no fighting between the boys. And it was easy because the Georgia Bill of Rights kept on giving me prompts about where the story should go. I can't say either thing about what will get posted next._

_Thanks for joining me on another ride through Hazzard. As Cooter would say, catch you on the flip side!_

**

* * *

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**Chapter Twelve – Of Course You Can**

_**Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 25: All citizens of the United States, resident in this State, are hereby declared citizens of this State, and it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to enact such laws as will protect them in the full enjoyment of the rights, privileges and immunities due to such citizenship.**_

Luke's cough had started back up in the night, and he really ought to have been in bed. And then there was Bo, who'd spent close to a week in this building, didn't need to come back to it this morning when he'd only gotten out last night. But her stubborn cousins had insisted on coming along with their Uncle Jesse on this trip to see that the Taylor family got the justice they deserved. Or maybe it was just to make sure Boss hadn't let them go in the night.

Bo probably had an ulterior motive in the need to see Miranda. Not that he'd said anything of the sort, but Daisy knew him better than he knew himself, probably. Or at least she remembered how she'd had the need to know that some of the scoundrels she'd dated were all right, even if they had spouted lies and committed crimes. So she understood where Bo was coming from, but if Daisy wound up in a room alone with Miranda, she'd probably wind up decking her. Because no one should ever hurt either of her cousins, but especially not Bo, whose heart was so big that breaking it was about as much of a challenge as shooting fish in a barrel.

"All right, you Dukes," was Rosco's greeting. "You're not wanted here, so you can just get!"

"It county property, Rosco," come the disinterested reminder from Bo. It was a pretty close to a daily argument, after all. "You can't kick us out."

"Gyoo," Rosco said, and couldn't any of them argue with that.

"Hi Daisy!" Enos had waited for the formalities to be out of the way before offering his usual greeting, and that special smile he saved just for her. Ever polite, he made sure to say his hellos to the rest of her family, including the customary dispute over whether Jesse was or was not Enos' uncle.

By the time he was done, Boss came blustering out of his office suggesting the same line of reasoning that Rosco had: Dukes were unwanted in this building, the town, in fact the whole county, and they should get lost. But the man was only grumpy because his latest money-making scheme had crumbled at his feet, like they always did.

"We ain't gonna stay long, J.D.," Uncle Jesse promised him. "We just wanted to make sure them Taylor kids got read their rights before they got locked up." Uncle Jesse's eyes swung to Rosco, and the man squirmed in ways that Daisy recognized from her own experience under that glare.

"Ijit!" was injured pride. "Of course they got read their rights Jesse! I'm the sheriff, I know all about rights!" He had more to say on the subject, it was clear. But when Flash let out a bass woof in complaint of all the noise near her big ears, Rosco just concluded with, "You tell 'em, girl!" which was a mercy for them all.

"All right then," was Jesse's agreeable response.

All her life she'd watched the man use a combination of charm and muscle to get what he wanted. No, not that, to get what was right, because Jesse Duke was anything but a selfish man. Just one with an amazing mixture of skills, and not a one of his kids had mastered them yet. But Daisy figured she'd come the closest. Bo was charming and Luke was smart and didn't either of them seem a lick interested in learning how to do what the other one could. Seemed like those two had better stick close to each other for their whole lives.

"The boys came to visit with the Taylor kids. Unless they's already used up their half hour of visitation," Jesse informed Rosco with a wink. "We wouldn't want to go breaking no rules or nothing."

"No, uh," Rosco looked to Boss like he was a cue card and all the right words would be written on his face. No help there, so Rosco went on, "No. They ain't. Used up their time. Ain't nobody been in to see them."

"All right then. Boys." Jesse said and gestured for them to go.

"Ijit! Wait a minute you Dukes! Ain't nobody going down there without me! I'm the sheriff in these parts and I say who gets to visit who and when…" but it faded as the three of them made their way down to the basement jail cells.

"And meanwhile, J.D., I thought you and me could have a nice chat. In your office." Jesse had Boss by the upper arm and was steering him toward the door already. A lesser man wouldn't have dared such a move.

"Now Jesse, I'm a busy man, got a lot to do and—"

"Oh, J.D., this won't take long," her uncle reasoned, and she had to cover her mouth against the giggle that wanted to pop out.

"—I ain't got time to talk to the likes of you!" But it was pointless. Jesse wanted to meet with him and Boss might as well give in and be met with. Which, she supposed, he must have, sometime after the door to the commissioner's office closed.

Leaving her alone with Enos and that bright smile that was his constant gift to her, one she never tired of receiving.

"So, Enos," she said, sitting on the edge of his desk and letting her legs dangle off the side. "What have you got planned for the day?"

* * *

"All right, Jesse Duke," and all the pretense of being so very busy, with no time at all to talk to his constituents, was gone from Boss's face. "What do you want?" Now he was just the same pudgy, blustering, scared little kid he'd been before money and self-importance had turned him pompous. "I ain't got all day." And there on the man's desk was the real reason he minded the intrusion. A virtual smorgasbord of greasy foods, from ham at one end to hash browns at the other, and just about every food group represented in between. All absolutely dripping with syrup, and Jesse had him a good idea that the tea cup was filled with the goop, too. Very prettily laid out, with a checkered tablecloth underneath. Lulu must have already brought Boss's second breakfast to him; more food there than the four hardworking Dukes had shared for their only morning meal.

"Easy, now J.D., easy. Ain't nothing much at all," Jesse said, as if he were speaking to a spooked mule or a complete fool. "I just reckon a man's got a right to know a couple of things. That is, when his nephew's spent the better part of a week in the county jail, while the fall crop rotted away." It was a slight exaggeration; they'd be able to rescue the corn so long as all four of them got right back at the harvest this afternoon. Cooter, no doubt, would join them by five-thirty, because the man had grown up a lot in the last few years, and knew how to make himself useful.

"Dat, Jesse, the boy was a suspect in two felony crimes," was Hogg's attempt at dismissing him. "I ain't like he's got a perfectly clean record."

This was the part where Jesse was supposed to get mad and start yelling about how his boys had more integrity in their little fingernails than J.D. had in his whole, impressive-girthed, body. But he wasn't going to bite down on that nibble.

"That may be so," he acknowledged, mellow as sipping 'shine. "But the first crime he was accused of was one you was committing. I just need to know for sure that you didn't have no part in the other one."

J.D.'s chin dropped in a grand show of just how hurt his feelings were at the insinuation. "Why, I don't know what you're talking about, Jesse Duke. I ain't committed no crimes. Not ever in my whole life."

It was a wonder that lightning didn't strike down right in the middle of the commissioner's office, taking out one pudgy jackass in a white suit. Jesse took a step away from the man, just in case.

"Now, J.D., you know and I know that you was rustling them horses. Oh, maybe not with your own hands," because ever since he'd amassed enough money to hire lackeys, Boss hadn't done a day's work, honest or otherwise. "But you was behind all that. It's that other thing, that girl pretending to be missing, that I need to know you didn't have no part in."

"I can't believe," and Boss's chest was puffing, wasn't a good sign. Meant the man was going to feign an insulted moral character. "You would accuse me, me! A fine, upstanding citizen of this county and—"

"J.D.," Jesse said, crossing the short distance between the man and the plethora of food on his desk, "You ain't been a fine upstanding nothing in all your born days. Now answer my question," he threatened, and grabbed a corner of the tablecloth between his thumb and forefinger, "or I'm gonna pull this here cloth right off the table and your breakfast here right along with it." Dukes revenged on property, not people, after all.

"Jesse," the man was a fool. He was coming forward as though he had anything like the upper hand in this situation. "Now you wouldn't—"

"Wouldn't I?" he answered, giving the cloth a light tug. Nothing too serious, only moved it a few inches. Just enough to send the butterdish crashing to the floor.

"Now Jesse," the tone was pleading, but the man hadn't given in yet. "There ain't no reason to go vandalizing a man's breakfast. Not when he's an innocent man, ain't got no idea—"

Another pull and the French toast joined the butter. Plate flipped so it hit the floor syrupy side down, and that there was going to be a heckuva mess to clean up.

"No!" Boss cried for his lost side dish. "I ain't done none of it, I swear!" A stuck pig squealing on a broken record, enough to make a man downright surly.

Jesse drowned it out with another, good, solid pull. The clatter was jarring, but it was worth the look on J.D.'s face.

"Not the ham," he mourned. "Jesse, I—no, don't pull on that no more. I… might have known about the horse rustling." Another tiny tug on the cloth. Nothing fell, but the waffles were teetering awfully close to the edge. "No! I did, I set up the horse rustling scheme. I did it, and I hired that Benjamin Taylor fellow to do the actual rustling. Of course, he weren't no good at it." Well, that was typical. No one could do anything well enough to suit Boss, but the man who knew so much about everything refused to do anything for himself. "Almost got himself caught out at the Kelty place. So I told him to make sure that his mistakes didn't make it all the way back to me. He framed Bo himself. Dat!" Funny how he reckoned Jesse would pull more food off the table for that part. The urge to do it must've registered on his face. "He did, he did. I didn't have no part in that. And I really didn't have no idea what happened to his sister." The sigh the man let out was sorrowful. "You can ask Rosco if you don't believe me. He done interrogated me."

It was enough to make a man laugh, the idea of Rosco putting J.D. through any kind of a rigorous questioning. But he didn't, he kept a straight face, because that was an important part of teaching a lesson.

"All right, J.D.," he said instead, "I'm gonna believe you. And I'm gonna spare the rest of your breakfast. If," he let go of the tablecloth to point a finger into the man's chest, "you promise me you ain't gonna go framing my boys—nor Daisy neither," because the man had no scruples and didn't care which Duke's life he was making miserable at any given time, "ever again."

"I promise," J.D. agreed, long, sorrowful face indicating his wretchedness. Oh, sure, his left hand was behind his back where Jesse couldn't see it, and there was no doubt the middle finger was crossed over the index as he said the words. But the promise was good for the rest of the day, at least, and a man had to take what he could get.

Next order of business was to convince the commissioner to take on Gary Butler and Alex Haddad as court-appointed counsel, so the men could get themselves paid for some honest work. The waffles were still there waiting to help him with the persuading.

* * *

Bo wasn't a mess, and that might have been the most surprising part of the whole experience.

It wasn't that he hadn't been glad to see his cousin when he crashed and stumbled his way into the Hastings stable last night. Though Luke'd managed not to take as hard a hit as Benjamin Taylor wanted to dole out, he was outgunned, then outmanned when Miranda's other brother joined the fray. Hand-to-board-to-hand contact was giving him a pretty serious headache by the time Bo showed up on the scene.

And as relieved as Luke was to have help, he just about wished he could tell his kid cousin to turn around and go right back out that door. Not to look too hard or he'd see things he didn't want to. How he'd been used and abandoned, and how the girl really _wasn't_ good enough for him.

Strange to think back on all those disagreements they'd had, not only about this girl, but any other one Bo had gotten serious about. _She ain't good enough_ was a constant point of contention between them; he'd announced this as fact to his cousin so many times it was practically a mantra by now. His goal was always for the fool to _see_ the girl for what she really was, right up until the moment when it was all right there in front of Bo's eyes, and then he wanted him to look away. To stop seeing exactly what Luke had been rubbing his nose in all along.

And Miranda Taylor, for all that she was pretty, and could be sweet and charming, wasn't good enough for Bo.

A fact he seemed to be taking all right, standing there by the bars and talking to the girl while Luke made a point of distracting Rosco. And her brothers, too, in the cell next to hers.

"You done read them their rights, Rosco?"

"Wijit! You Dukes, you ain't got no—I'm the sheriff here, don't you go sassing, me boy, ijit! Don't you got telling me what I gotta do, or I'll, you'll just be, you'll be under the jail is where you'll be—" He reckoned eventually Rosco would manage to say something. Or not. Whichever way, that yammering he was doing got to knocking around Luke's skull in the same rhythm as the headache he was going to have for a few days. Jesse had every expectation of making a big deal out of it, dragging him off to the doc, but it wasn't anything a few nights of good sleep wouldn't cure. Besides, the old man needed all of their help, starting today, if there was going to be any chance of saving that corn crop.

Bo was done with whatever quiet words he'd had for the girl he'd spent the better part of the fall with. He was back at Luke's side now, heavy arm hanging across his shoulders. It was the exactly same stance his cousin always took, and it was completely different. Less confident, a slight nervousness to the way those fingers fidgeted on Luke's upper arm. Maybe his ankle was bothering him, but it didn't seem like it. Hadn't been swollen when they got up, and Bo hadn't limped once all morning.

Felt more like a question, the way Bo was careful about taking up the space next to him. Maybe: _can I lean on you?_ So Luke turned his head away from where the sheriff was still sputtering. Caught Bo's eye, then deliberately loosened his arm from where it had been folded across his chest. Slung it around his cousin's waist, and pulled him closer.

_Of course you can._

* * *

Luke had a brother. There was no getting around that fact.

Miranda had brothers, too. She was loyal to them, even when they didn't deserve it. Then again, he figured families were like that. Not all the time, maybe, but he could remember times when him and Luke had been just about ready to get their hides tanned for fighting with each other, and then they'd turn around and defend each other against the whip. There were black eyes and bloody noses between him and Luke, too. They'd skinned each other's outer layers away until there was nothing left except raw soul, and then they'd taken a few more swipes right where it was most tender.

Bo reckoned he could forgive Miranda for being part of setting him up. She'd been requested to do so by her family, and Bo understood that kind of loyalty. Mostly he was thankful that Jesse, Luke and Daisy would never ask him to hurt another person on their behalf. His family didn't believe in causing harm to anyone, but unfortunately, Miranda was loyal to brothers that did.

And Luke had told him how she might not have exactly chosen to participate in all of it, how she'd been hurt by Benjamin, too.

"You don't deserve to be in here," he told her through the same bars he'd been behind just yesterday. Gauze across his palm itched where Luke had taped it back up this morning. Nothing more than a scratch under there, but if his cousin needed to put a bandage on it, Bo wasn't going to stop him.

She shook her head, same kind of passive she'd been last night. But she was scared and alone in a way Bo would never be. Sure, she had brothers right in the next cell. Benjamin, the oldest, should have had the influence on her life that Luke had had on Bo's. But she couldn't trust her brother not to hurt her, and that had to be the saddest feeling of all.

"I—I ain't in love with you, Miranda." It probably wasn't a nice thing to say to a girl who was being held on suspicion of horse rustling and aiding and abetting the false report of a kidnapping. "But I do care about you. I'm your friend, that ain't changed." It wasn't much to offer, but it did get her to look at him. Her face had dirt smudged tear tracks, her hair hung in limp clumps around her face, but she was still a sweet-looking little thing. "I'm gonna help you get out," he added. After saddling his family with the likes of Alex Haddad, Gary Butler owed them one. Bo meant to collect.

Miranda nodded at him, said a quiet, "Thank you." She looked to her left, where Benjamin and Wilburn were watching Rosco ramble something about locking Luke under the jail.

"No, sweetheart," Bo told her. "I ain't helping them none. They ain't good for you." Besides, it was getting on time that the girl learned how to stand on her own two feet. Which she'd have to do, if the Dukes could get her out of here. Because she sure couldn't lean all her weight on Bo, either. "You take care now," he told her.

And turned back to Luke. Slipped an arm across his shoulders like he always had. Wondered if his cousin minded, wondered if Luke ever felt like he did about Miranda right now. Like she was a weight that was too heavy to bear all on his own.

That line of thought flew out the barred window of the dank basement Bo had spent most of the week in, alone and scared, when Luke slid his own arm around Bo's waist and pulled him closer.

Luke had Jud, and he'd do anything for his little brother. Except – and they didn't have to test this to know it was true – ever let anything bad happen to Bo.

* * *

A sheriff never got a moment's peace. After last night, he figured the Hazzard law had earned a quiet morning, maybe the kind where a man could finally get some flea powder into his dog's fur. But right about the time he was pulling a fresh can of the stuff out, the dang Dukes showed up.

No peace and no rest, just escorting two law-sassing, lollygagging plowboys down to the jail. And getting interrogated by Luke Duke, who had no business poking into police procedures that way. Not when Rosco had not only given the Taylors their rights, but also gotten a full confession out of the girl, along with explanations about how that bloody jacket he'd worried about all week was covered in nothing worse than store-bought beef's blood. It had been a dang long night, and he didn't need guff from the likes of lazy Duke boys. He'd no sooner put Luke in his place and then escorted them disrespectful Dukes out of his jail and up into the squad room, when Boss was nagging at him.

"That orange clunker car," the man was saying and his breath smelled of the bon bons he'd always refused to share with Rosco. "Is illegally parked in front of the entryway."

True enough, the General Lee was sitting in the exact spot that Boss had deemed off-limits that very morning. The fact that he hadn't had time to purchase and erect a sign yet, well that wasn't the commissioner's fault. Nor Rosco's neither.

"Now you just wait a minute, Boss," Bo Duke was hollering, like he got to doing whenever things weren't exactly going his way. "That there is a legal parking space, same as it's always been."

"No it ain't," Boss answered back in his best sing-song tone. "On account of it's blocking the main entrance to a official county building."

"It ain't blocking nothing, it's just parked out there at the curb like all the others," Rosco heard Bo dispute.

Daisy's voice jumped in there, too, and Jesse's and then finally Luke's.

"Bo! Come on, it ain't worth arguing. Let's just get it out of there, before…" Rosco didn't hear the rest, he was already in the hallway, running as fast as his legs would carry him. Had to get his ticket book out too, and fuss with that tricky handle on the door. By the time he was stepping out onto the concrete steps out front, he could hear the clomping of running boot heels behind him.

Seemed like them Duke boys were going to try to escape another fine. But to do that, they were going to have to get past the sheriff and duly constituted law in Hazzard County. He reckoned he had only about ten seconds before the shucking and jiving began. The sky was blue and cloudless, the air was fresh and crisp. It was a good day for a chase. Rosco might even let them pull his hat down over his eyes, first.


End file.
